scholarly journals Reflections on Rails and the City

Transfers ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-130
Author(s):  
George Revill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Personal Mobility ◽  
City Life ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The City ◽  
Rail Travel

As the articles in this special section show, railways mark out urban experience in very distinctive ways. In the introduction, Steven D. Spalding makes plain there is no clear relationship between railway development and the shape and size of cities. For many cities, suburban rail travel has been either substantially insignificant or a relative latecomer as a factor in urban growth and suburbanization. Walking, tramways and the omnibus may indeed have had a much greater impact on built form, yet the cultural impact of railways on the city life should not be minimized. Iconic city stations are both objects of civic pride and socially heterogeneous gateways to the promise of a better urban life. The physical presence of substantial tracts of infrastructure, viaducts, freight yards and warehousing, divide and segregate residential districts encouraging and reinforcing status differentials between communities. Subways, metros, and suburban railways open on to the often grubby quotidian underbelly of city life whilst marking out a psychic divide between work and domesticity, city and suburb. Railways not only produced new forms of personal mobility but by defining the contours, parameters, and possibilities of this experience, they have come to help shape how we think about ourselves as urbanized individuals and societies. The chapters in this special section mark out some of this territory in terms of, for example: suburbanization, landscape, and nationhood (Joyce); the abstractions of urban form implicit in the metro map (Schwetman); the underground as a metaphor for the topologically enfolded interconnections of urban process (Masterson-Algar); and the competing lay and professional interests freighting urban railway development (Soppelsa). In the introduction Spalding is right to stress both the multiple ways that railways shape urban experience and the complex processes that continuously shape and re-shape urban cultures as sites of contest and sometimes conflict. As Richter suggests, in the nineteenth century only rail travel demanded the constant and simultaneous negotiation of both urban social disorder and the systematic ordering associated with large technological systems and corporate business. Thus “the railroad stood squarely at the crossroad of the major social, business, cultural and technological changes remaking national life during the second half of the nineteenth century.”

scholarly journals The city as experience and inspiration. Critical reflections on urbanity in contemporary art

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Zoltán Somhegyi
Keyword(s):  
Contemporary Art ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The City ◽  
Survey Analyses ◽  
Critical Reflections

In this paper I am proposing to investigate some possible connecting points between art, aesthetics and the urban experience, more precisely how the perception and experience of the city as well as the features of urban life can inspire artists. At the same time, I am also curious how artworks can be used to understand this urban experience, as well as how they can be interpreted as not only simple descriptions and depictions, but also as active contributions and modes of suggesting solutions to the most pressing issues of contemporary cities and of city life. Hence my primary aim is discussing some approaches towards the aesthetic analyses of urbanity through modern and contemporary examples. In this way I am focusing less on how the city appears as a mere motive in artworks, or how it is used as main object or background element indicating the context in representations; and I am also not aiming to provide a survey analyses of the numerous ideas of the aesthetics of urbanity. Instead of these, here I am concentrating on how urbanity and the experiencing of the city(life) in itself as well as its multifaceted aspects can become a source of inspiration and at the same time a critically analysed subject, i.e. a concept that is examined through the work itself.

Diversity As A Unique Constellation of Superimposing Network Logics

2012 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 6-14
Author(s):  
Alain Thierstein ◽  
Anne Wiese
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Industrial Sites ◽  
Individual Site ◽  
Scale Levels ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City ◽  
Underlying Processes

In the context of the European city, the regeneration of former industrial sites is a unique opportunity to actively steer urban development. These plots of land gain strategic importance in actively triggering development on the city scale. Ideally, these interventions radiate beyond the individual site and contribute to the strengthening of the location as a whole. International competition between locations is rising and prosperous development a precondition for wealth and wellbeing. This approach to the regeneration of inner city plots makes high demands on all those involved. Our framework suggests a stronger focus of the conceptualization and analysis of idiosyncratic resources, to enable innovative approaches in planning. On the one hand, we are discussing spatially restrained urban plots, which have the capacity and need to be reset. On the other hand, each plot is a knot in the web of relations on a multiplicity of scales. The material city is nested into a set of interrelated scale levels – the plot, the quarter, the city, the region, potentially even the polycentric megacity region. The immaterial relations however span a multicity of scale levels. The challenge is to combine these two perspectives for their mutual benefit. The underlying processes are constitutive to urban space diversity, as urban form shapes urban life and vice versa.

Urban Formalism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Faflik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Subjective Experience ◽  
The West ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Street Protest ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Form ◽  
The City

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.

Sets and the City: Staging London and Oliver Twist

2018 ◽  
pp. 51-90
Author(s):  
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
The Novel ◽  
City Life ◽  
The City

This chapter tracks multiple ways in which Oliver Twist and London’s cityscape were adapted for the stage in the late 1830s. It argues that London was a flexible frame through which the audience’s reception of Dickens’s work was mediated in early dramatisations, but also that the novel was imaginatively mapped on to the built environment. For example, Sadler’s Wells emphasise the proximity of the criminal scenes by staging their adaptation as a local drama, while the Surrey Theatre presents their play as an opportunity for armchair tourism. In staging alternative versions of the city, theatres presented differently nuanced portrayals of its inhabitants and perceived social problems. The dynamic re-presentation of Oliver Twist in early theatrical adaptations is thereby indicative of the malleability of Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century improvement debates, and these plays were likewise supposed to have an effect on contemporary city-life. Playscripts, stagecraft, actors’ performances, music, and the perceived identities of theatres and their audiences each played a role in curating these representations, and so this chapter adopts an intertheatrical methodology.

scholarly journals Narrating palimpsestic spaces

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1163-1180
Author(s):  
David J Marshall ◽  
Lynn A Staeheli ◽  
Dima Smaira ◽  
Konstantin Kastrissianakis
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Digital Storytelling ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Divided Societies ◽  
Medieval Manuscripts ◽  
Methodological Approaches ◽  
The City

The term ‘palimpsest’ refers to medieval manuscripts that have been multiply erased and inscribed with the overlapping texts of successive scribes. More recently and amongst academics, the term has become a metaphor for describing the city, including both the physical urban form as well as memories and experiences of everyday urban life. The palimpsest offers a way of thinking not only about urban transformation, where new and repurposed structures exist alongside the old, but also changes in how the city is experienced, or how life stories are written upon and rewrite existing spaces. This paper focuses on the latter. Though the palimpsest metaphor has been used to describe material transformations of the urban, the question that this paper raises is: how can the notion of the palimpsest inform methodological approaches to researching how the city is lived and seen? Collaborative, digital storytelling that combines images, narration, and sound can provide a method that emphasises the polyvocality and multi-temporality that the term palimpsest implies. A palimpsestic approach to digital storytelling, as a visual and narrative method, gestures at places as open to future readings and inscriptions. This is relevant to all cities, but perhaps most obviously in cities where historical narratives, memories of violence, and questions over the future political direction of the country in which the city is located are all highly contested. To illustrate these points, this paper draws upon research conducted with young people in Beirut, Lebanon as part of a wider study about how youth experience citizenship and belonging in divided societies.

scholarly journals Battling "the bane of our cities": Class, territory, and the prohibition debate in Toronto, 1877

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-48
Author(s):  
M. P. Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Option ◽  
Public Drinking ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Working

In the nineteenth century, the tavern was an important institution in urban working-class life. Because of the social ills associated with alcohol abuse and public drinking, there were frequent attempts to lessen the tavern's importance or to eliminate it entirely. This paper examines several tavern-related issues that emerged in Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s. The Crooks Act, passed in 1876, employed powerful measures to deal with political and temperance questions simultaneously. The intersection of class, politics, temperance, and urban life led to a territorial solution to the liquor question. These issues were dealt with by the people of Toronto in 1877, when they declined to prohibit public drinking in the city via the Dunkin Act, a local option prohibition statute of the Province of Canada.

Jerome and the Sham Christians of Rome

1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Curran
Keyword(s):  
Social Background ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Family ◽  
The Social ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

scholarly journals Ocean As Place For Urban Life:  Building on Water to Combat Urban Congestion & Climate Change

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Piers Brereton Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Life ◽  
Coastal City ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Coastal Cities ◽  
Job Opportunities ◽  
Flexible Framework ◽  
Architectural Development ◽  
The City

<p>Coastal cities form some of the largest and most important cities in the world. The unique character of these cities has been shaped and moulded by the coastal environment. As powerful as these cities seem they have became vulnerable. Coastal cities face the need to expand with rapidly growing populations, also, sea level rise has been increased by climate change, which threatens this expansion and the city itself. This thesis explores how the effects of climate change and urban congestion can be mitigated through architectural development, incorporating a flexible framework for housing and the adaption of the urban fabric to living on water. It seeks to change the perception of buildable space and adapt to the changing face of the coastal city and its environment. The research finds that responses to the coastal city problem exist only as separate projects independent of one another. A unified solution is needed to mitigate these issues between all coastal cities. This can be resolved by combining strategies within further inner city developments. The project responds to coastal city issues as well as adapting to current city inhabitation. Modern city life is one of change and movement. Travel between cities is frequent due to changing lifestyles and job opportunities. Developing on this lifestyle, the project successfully investigates a solution to help protect and improve the life of the coastal city, addressing the problems of tomorrow, today.</p>

scholarly journals Participatory Infrastructures: The Politics of Mobility Platforms

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-346
Author(s):  
Peter T. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
User Interfaces ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Architecture ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Deliberation ◽  
The City

Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out.

scholarly journals Post-flânerie: How do mobile devices shape the experience of the city?

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 01005
Author(s):  
Gorsev Argin ◽  
Burak Pak ◽  
Handan Turkoglu
Keyword(s):  
Mobile Devices ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Mobile Technologies ◽  
Mutual Relationship ◽  
Urban Experience ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
Modern Cities ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

In the last decade, the advances in mobile technologies and location-based applications reshaped our mutual relationship with the urban environment. These technologies, as both a mean and barrier to the engagement between humans and their environment, have transformed the urban experience in profound ways. Urban experience is a relatively new concept introduced with the rise of modern cities in the nineteenth century. Its loss due to the rapid urbanization has been a subject of debate since then. Among the discussions that take place in this debate, the figure of ‘flâneur’ plays an extensive role. The flâneur is a figure who wanders through and appropriates the metropolitan city in pursuit of urban experience and reaps aesthetic meaning from the spectacle of the teeming crowds. Flânerie, or the act of wandering, and its implications for our understanding of urban life have been profound. Today, mobile technologies create a new kind of urban wanderer which is described as “post-flâneur”. In this paper, by examining the altering concept of flânerie, we discuss the effects of mobile technologies on urban experience. Based on an informed study of a wide range of theories, we make reflections on the impact of mobile devices on the mutual relationship between humans and their environment, introduce key concepts for understanding the emergent phenomenon of post-flânerie and elaborate on its interconnections with the phenomena of cyber and hybrid-flânerie.

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