The Abolition of Slavery

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-203
Author(s):  
Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
French History ◽  
Political Body ◽  
High Iron ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Power Strategies ◽  
Culture Of Silence ◽  
The City

April 24th 1998, a two-meter-high iron statue of a slave, arms raised towards the sky, breaking free from his/her chains, was erected clandestinely in Nantes, the primary French slave port of the eighteenth century. Faced with the local government’s refusal to erect a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer association decided, in secret, to commission a sculpture. Following the organization’s initial success of hijacking the inauguration, the statue was vandalized. It soon became a performative monument, a memorial palimpsest, and a centre stage of a symbolic combat where opponents and supporters clashed. This essay reveals the democratic praxis at the heart of this commemoration debate. With both the pressure of citizens on the political body, and the triple practice of diversion, subversion, and taking hostage of (public) space, the association thwarts the writing and power strategies of the city of Nantes and its culture of silence. Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer not only resists official discourse but subsequently imposes its own version of French history on the whitened pages of France’s colonial narrative, thus reclaiming a past, a story, an identity, by bringing to light existences and testimonies, and defining new lieux de parole.

scholarly journals The (No-)Public Space. Reviewing the Transformation of Al-Qaed Ibrahim's Urban Image

2020 ◽  
pp. 177-192
Author(s):  
Iman Hegazy
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Political ◽  
Urban Image ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Events ◽  
The One ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Public spaces are defined as places that should be accessible to all inhabitants without restrictions. They are spaces not only for gathering, socializing and celebrating but also for initiating discussions, protesting and demonstrating. Thus, public spaces are intangible expressions of democracy—a topic that the paper tackles its viability within the context of Alexandria, case study Al-Qaed Ibrahim square. On the one hand, Al-Qaed Ibrahim square which is named after Al-Qaed Ibrahim mosque is a sacred element in the urban fabric; whereas on the other it represents a non-religious revolutionary symbol in the Alexandrian urban public sphere. This contradiction necessitates finding an approach to study the characteristic of this square/mosque within the Alexandrian context—that is to realize the impact of the socio-political events on the image of Al-Qaed Ibrahim square, and how it has transformed into a revolutionary urban symbol and yet into a no-public space. The research revolves around the hypothesis that the political events taking place in Egypt after January 25th, 2011, have directly affected the development of urban public spaces, especially in Alexandria. Therefore methodologically, the paper reviews the development of Al-Qaed Ibrahim square throughout the Egyptian socio-political changes, with a focus on the square’s urban and emotional contextual transformations. For this reason, the study adheres to two theories: the "city elements" by Kevin Lynch and "emotionalizing the urban" by Frank Eckardt. The aim is not only to study the mentioned public space but also to figure out the changes in people’s societal behaviour and emotion toward it. Through empowering public spaces, the paper calls the different Egyptian political and civic powers to recognize each other, regardless of their religious, ethnical or political affiliations. It is a step towards replacing the ongoing political conflicts, polarization, and suppression with societal reconciliation, coexistence, and democracy.

The Experience of Personal Government between the Factions and the Popolo

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Gamberini
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Language And Culture ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The City

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, two new actors made their appearance in the political life of the communes: the factions and the Societas Populi. This chapter focuses on the political language and culture of these two elements, highlighting the tendency of various social actors to consistently represent the unity of the political body. This was the supreme value which neither the factions nor the Popolo would renounce, even when they were alone in power: on the contrary, in fact, it was very much in that kind of situation that the parties tended to represent themselves as ‘the whole’. The chapter then goes on to examine the role that both the factions and the Societas Populi played in fostering the first experiences of lordly government in the city.

Eating in the City: Fidel Gastro, Street Performance, and the Right to the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Whittall
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
The Political ◽  
Food Trucks ◽  
Political Narratives ◽  
Urban Narratives ◽  
Street Performance ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

This chapter applies different concepts of radical street theatre and urban performance in order to theorize the ways in which food trucks form temporary communities in urban spaces through embodied, performative intervention. An ethnographic portrait of one of Toronto’s first and best-known food truck entrepreneurs, Fidel Gastro, is employed to demonstrate the precarious position food trucks hold within the political narratives governing public space in the city of Toronto, and the ambivalence food truck entrepreneurs display toward current configurations of urban market economies. David Harvey’s conception of the right to the city is then critically applied to this scenario in order to argue that food trucks harbor the potential to intervene in dominant urban narratives, allowing urban dwellers to assert the common right to change ourselves by changing our cities.

Bolt cutters and the politics of expropriation: Homes Not Jails, urban squatting, and gentrification

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Sean Parson
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
The State ◽  
Differential Treatment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Private Space ◽  
Sister Organization ◽  
City Agencies ◽  
The City ◽  
Food Not Bombs

Chapter 6 looks at the response from the Jordan administration on Food Not Bombs’ sister organization, Homes Not Jails, which illegally housed the homeless in abandoned buildings. In interviews with people involved in both Food Not Bombs and Homes Not Jails, I was often told stories of police leniency with the squatters, something that was unheard of for Food Not Bombs’ actions. This differential treatment concerns the political nature of space and the city’s desire to hide the homeless from public view. Because the city wanted to push the homeless into private space, Homes Not Jails, by illegally housing the homeless in abandoned houses, ended up unintentionally working to help the Jordan administration achieve part of his public space goal. This chapter argues that city agencies react to autonomous political projects differently depending on whether they erupt in what the state defines as public or private space.

scholarly journals Óræð inngrip og pólitísk orðræða í borginni

Ritið ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-103
Author(s):  
Æsa Sigurjónsdóttir
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Institutions ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Art Practices ◽  
The City

In this article I discuss how various collective art projects involving artists and curators using the city as an exhibition site have transformed artistic discourse in Iceland. Chantal Mouffe´s conception of public space as a battleground and art practices as agnostic interventions into this space raise questions about the branding and commodification of art and cultural institutions. Mouffe believes that despite the unrestrained commercial control of the urban landscape, artists still have the possibility of intervening in the political and economic status quo. Employing Mouffe´s analyses as a guiding principle, the study confirms that the permanent value of art in public spaces need not be limited to individual artists’ form, style or content, but may be capable of mobilizing political, critical and artistic discussions within the urban community.

scholarly journals Marginalizing the Victim and the Political Body of the People

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 208-244
Author(s):  
Marina Koretskaya
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Catastrophic Events ◽  
Political Body ◽  
The People ◽  
Independent Media

The article examines Judith Butler’s performative approach to the concept of the people, which allows to not only outline the boundaries of a certain model of political theology, so important for conservative political thought, but to also see the significance born by the acts of entry by collective bodies into public space. In this context, the figure of the victim can have a consolidating function, being the potentially affectively condensed point of the collective body’s assembling. The marginalization of the victim’s body is analyzed through the concept of the politics of grief and that of ungrievable lives. The victim’s marginalization is shown to be a multidimensional phenomenon. Not only the victim, but also the criminal can be marginalized, as well as various circumstances of catastrophic events and acts of violence. Examples taken from the Russian news in recent years illustrate how important the independent media audience’s perception of victims are: whether they perceive the victims they are informed about as marginal or as pertinent to their own lives and identities, whether the audience is ready to shift the boundaries toward greater inclusivity and to reinstate

Aron Beckerman's City of Light: writing French history and defining immigrant Jewish space in interwar Paris

Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 618-634 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICK UNDERWOOD
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Pivotal Role ◽  
French History ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
The City ◽  
Historical Theory

ABSTRACT:This article examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman's writings on Paris – its history and specific places within the city – we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it meant to be ‘French’.

scholarly journals Socially engaged architecture of the 1950s and its transformations

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (42) ◽  
pp. 194-222
Author(s):  
Jasna Galjer ◽  
Sanja Lončar
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Architectural Design ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Purpose ◽  
Time Periods ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Work Education ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The City

This paper investigates the links between architecture and its social purpose and focuses specifically on the building and institution known today as the Public Open University Zagreb (Pučko otvoreno učilište Zagreb – POUZ), which was previously called Moša Pijade Workers' (and People's) University (Radničko (i narodno) sveučilište "Moša Pijade" – RANS). The paper examines the innovative and experimental nature of the architectural concept of socially engaged architecture as part of the societal modernisation of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as changes to its function up to the present post-socialist condition. The authors discuss the complex relationship between employees, beneficiaries, programmes and the architectural design and the political, economic and social context. The aim is to explore sociocultural categories and how culture, work, education and the city interacted with one another during different time periods. By using theoretical and methodological insights gleaned from cultural anthropological approaches to space and architecture, the paper demonstrates how the identity, significance and values ascribed to the production of public space were shaped, medialized and modified through time.

Occupying Paulista: Housing activism, the new right and the politics of public space during the Brazilian crisis

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 072551362110239
Author(s):  
Victor Albert
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
New Right ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Brazilian Society ◽  
Political Symbolism ◽  
Political Left ◽  
Political Right ◽  
The City

Brazilian society has frequently been described as polarized during the country’s recent political and economic crisis. In 2018, a wave of opposition to the centre-left Workers’ Party culminated in the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist who portrays the political left as a malevolent force in Brazilian society. In this paper I explore this polarization through drawing on ethnographic research with the Homeless Workers’ Movement ( Movimento de Trablhadores Sem-Teto, MTST), a large urban social movement that develops settlements on underutilized land in the city, and a prominent civil society opponent of Bolsonaro. More specifically, I examine a key site of socio-spatial tension in São Paulo, Paulista Avenue, as a new political right came to predominate on the city’s main thoroughfare during the campaign to impeach the Workers’ Party President, Dilma Rousseff. I show how the perceived intolerance of the mobilized right helped to establish new normative codes that regulated the political symbolism which could be displayed in public spaces. Lastly, I consider how the vilification of the MTST in particular and the political left in general by the new right is embedded in broader structures of stigmatization.

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