Charles Dickens and Metropolitan Improvements

2018 ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
The City

For readers who are unfamiliar with the historical contexts underpinning London’s improvement in the mid-nineteenth century, Chapter 1 offers an account of the processes and problems of improvement during Dickens’s lifetime. Addressing the fragmentation of the built environment and the diverse actors and institutions who commented on and influenced metropolitan developments, it suggests that the haphazard nature of improvement in the mid-nineteenth century dovetailed generatively with Dickens’s style and popularity, and that this enabled his works to be used effectively to promote urban change. Far from suggesting that people credulously accepted Dickens’s descriptions as “realistic” accounts of contemporary London conditions, however, this chapter (and, indeed, the book as a whole) argues that mid-nineteenth-century users of Dickens treated his novels as a store of widely known imagery that could be superimposed on to the urban environment. Afterlives were self-consciously curated to enable discussion about large and complex social problems, to make users’ critiques more pointed and memorable, or to curate legible representations of the city.

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.

Dickens and Demolition

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Hofer-Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Cultural Work ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
Multiple Media

Dickens and Demolition is the first study to trace and measure the material impact of Charles Dickens’s fiction in London’s built environment. The book analyses debates surrounding large-scale metropolitan demolitions, modernisation or reform projects in the mid-nineteenth century and tracks a Dickensian vocabulary in these discussions across multiple media and fora, including written commentaries, parliamentary debates, theatre and the visual arts. It argues that tropes, characters and extracts from his fiction were repeatedly remediated to articulate and negotiate contemporary anxieties about the urban environment and linked social problems. In so doing, it poses the questions: what cultural work is performed by literary afterlives? And can we trace their material effects in the spaces we inhabit?

Parkour, Masculinity, and the City

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey L. Kidder
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Gender Identities ◽  
The People ◽  
Ethnographic Data ◽  
Performance Of Gender ◽  
Spatial Appropriation ◽  
The City ◽  
A Performance

Parkour is a new, and increasingly popular, sport in which individuals athletically and artistically negotiate obstacles found in the urban environment. In this article, I position parkour as a performance of masculinity involving spatial appropriation. Through ethnographic data I show how young men involved in the sport use the city (both the built environment and the people within it) as a structural resource for the construction and maintenance of gender identities. The focus of my research highlights the performance of gender as a spatialized process.

Architecture of Apocalypse, City of Lights

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-162
Author(s):  
Marion Schmid
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Population Growth ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
New Wave ◽  
New Towns ◽  
Post War ◽  
Historic City ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City ◽  
Housing Estates

The inception of the New Wave coincided with a profound mutation of the French urban fabric: parts of historic city centers were razed in post-war modernisation schemes, while 'new towns' were planned outside major cities to relieve the pressure of population growth. This chapter analyses New Wave filmmakers' diverse engagement with architecture - old and new - and urban change in both fictional and documentary genres. Themes for discussion include New Wave directors' ambivalent representation of the new forms of architectural modernity that emerged in France in the 1950s and 60s; their interrogation of the living conditions on modern housing estates; and their examination of the relationship between the built environment, affect, and memory. The chapter also considers the movement's fascination with the tactile textures and surfaces of the city.

scholarly journals HOW ARE PUBLIC SPACES SUSTAINING CULTURAL IDENTITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF CHINA’S INCREASINGLY GLOBALLY FOCUSED URBAN DEVELOPMENTS: USING A CASE STUDY OF PUTUO IN SHANGHAI

2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
pp. 198-205
Author(s):  
Hee Sun (Sunny) Choi
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Cultural Identities ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Global Presence ◽  
The City

This paper explores what it means for a public space to embody the city within rapid urban change in contemporary urban development and how a space can accomplish this by embracing the culture of the city, its people and its places, using the particular case of Putuo, Shanghai in China. The paper employs mapping and empirical surveys to learn how the local community use the act of communal dance in everyday public spaces of this neighborhood, and seeks not to find generalizable rules for how humans comprehend a city, but instead to better understand how local inhabitants and their chosen activities can influence their built environment. The findings from this emphasize the importance to identify how public spaces can help to define cities with China’s emerging global presence, whilst addressing the ways in which local needs and perspectives can be preserved.

scholarly journals ΦΙΛΑΝΘΡΩΠΙΑ, ΤΕΧΝΙΚΗ ΕΚΠΑΙΔΕΥΣΗ ΚΑΙ ΕΡΓΑΤΙΚΑ ΑΤΥΧΗΜΑΤΑ ΣΤΟΝ ΠΕΙΡΑΙΑ ΤΟ ΤΕΛΕΥΤΑΙΟ ΤΡΙΤΟ ΤΟΥ 19ου ΑΙΩΝΑ

Μνήμων ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 85 ◽  
Author(s):  
ΓΙΑΝΝΗΣ ΚΟΚΚΙΝΑΚΗΣ
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Technical Education ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
The City

<p>John Kokkinakis, Philanthropy, technical education and labour accidentsin Piraeus in the last third of nineteenth century</p><p>Concern for the relief of poverty, the support and education of orphansand the living conditions of the working classes was in nineteenth centuryGreece a response to complex social phenomena: urbanization and industrialization,the emergence of new types of poverty and unemployment,the forging of class consciousness in the middle and upper socialclasses.This article reviews the formation and activities of the orphanageof E. Zani in Piraeus and the emergence of specialized technical institutionsin this industrial and commercial port. Documents from charitableactivities of the city magistrates enable us to draw useful informationsregarding the urban poor and unemployed population. The economicand social problems related with labour discipline in general and childlabour in particular may explain the importance of the ideological andcompulsory factors mobilized for ensuring social and industrial peace.In this respect, it was crucial to undertake a new approach towardpoverty, work, and leisure and new educational practices embodyingsuch values as discipline, thrift, diligence and respect.</p>

Imperial Visions of Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
pp. 30-62
Author(s):  
Kathryn Babayan
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Image ◽  
Four Corners ◽  
Friday Prayer ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The City

Chapter 1 begins with Shah Abbas I’s imperial building project of the square that transforms Isfahan into an urban image of paradise, modeling the experience of an ideal city as the epitome of beauty and desire. Spatially divided into four corners and regimented into clearly defined sections, the rectangular square was the page the shah authored as his anthology of the city. The ways in which he and the religious scholar Shaykh Bahaʾi planned the built environment in and around the square, as well as the epigraphy the shaykh commissioned for the walls of the Friday Prayer Mosque, collectively reveal how monarch and shaykh wished their subjects to experience state-sponsored forms of urbanity. This chapter lays the groundwork for the making of Isfahan’s homoerotic culture and its reception in anthologies.

scholarly journals Walkable Environments and Healthy Urban Moves: Urban Context Features Assessment Framework Experienced in Milan

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 2778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Rebecchi ◽  
Maddalena Buffoli ◽  
Marco Dettori ◽  
Letizia Appolloni ◽  
Antonio Azara ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Physical Activity ◽  
Health Promotion ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Active Transport ◽  
Assessment Tools ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Assessment Framework ◽  
Design Recommendations ◽  
The City

Recent studies in public health have focused on determining the influences of the built environment on the population’s physical and mental health status. In order to promote active transport and physical activity, considered favorable behavior for the prevention non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as obesity, it is necessary to reduce the negative effects of the built environment and develop positive ones, such as, for example, a walkable urban space. The aim of the research is to define a city’s walkability assessment framework capable of highlighting points of strength and weakness in its urban environment. All of the aspects that have a direct influence (evidence-based) on fostering the adoption of healthy lifestyles or promoting active transport as a strategy to increase the level of physical activity due to the existence of daily urban travel should be considered. After conducting a literature review aimed at identifying all of the existing assessment tools, 20 research studies were examined in detail. The new evaluation method arises from the comparison and critical selection of the various qualitative–quantitative indicators found, integrated into a multi-criteria analysis structure of dual-scale survey, with reference to walkability and paying attention to those indicators that have implications on health promotion. The new assessment framework, named Milano Walkability Measurement (MWM), is applicable in different urban contexts and was tested in two different areas of Milan. The Macro dimension (i.e., Density, Diversity, and Design criteria) refers to the urban scale and examines the city from a top view. It describes quantitatively the overall urban factors (urban area size equal to 1.5 Km2; typology of data: archival). The Micro dimension (i.e., Usefulness, Safeness, Comfort, and Aesthetics criteria) investigates the city at the street scale level. It describes qualitatively features of the outdoor spaces (road length of about 500/700 mt; typology of data: observational). Finally, the framework was weighted by comparison with a panel of experts. The expected results were reflected in the design recommendations based on the collected qualitative-quantitative data. The developed assessment method brings innovative criteria such as the multi-scaling assessment phase (Macro and Micro) and the ability to take into consideration aspects that according to the literature have relationships with health promotion linked to the improvement of a healthy lifestyle, related to daily active transportation choices. The design recommendations are useful both to policy-makers, to make evidence-based specific choices, and to designers, to understand what aspects of the urban environment must be improved or implemented in order to promote a walkable city.

scholarly journals Examining the Effects of the Ragged School in Literature

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 1090-1096
Author(s):  
Cristina Guarneri
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Significant Element ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
To Receive ◽  
The City

The ability to educate all children, despite social class was an important responsibility. However, some of these problems included social problems that had been faced by poor children during this Victorian Era. Charles Dickens encountered the ragged schooling, which made a lasting impact upon him and is said to have been a significant element in his writing of A Christmas Carol. It was through Charles Dickens’ legacy was using his novels and other works to reveal a world of poverty and unimaginable struggles. His vivid descriptions of the life of street children in the city, workhouses and Yorkshire boarding schools lead to many reforms. Although “Ragged” Schools began to grow and were seen as a movement. For many who would not have been able to have an education, authors such as Charles Dickens, was able to receive a free education and a betterment of life for the poor, that would and will, even today, inspire others to do something to help those suffering in oppression and poverty.

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