scholarly journals The Transformation of Urban Public Space of Post-Soviet Yerevan

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1 (31)) ◽  
pp. 3-15
Author(s):  
Harutyun Vermishyan ◽  
Srbuhi Michikyan
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Structural Elements ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Space Production ◽  
Depth Interviews

The aim of this study is to diagnose the transformation of the structure of the public space of the Northern Avenue of Yerevan. The theoretical basis of this research is A. Lefebvre's theory of space production. The spatial triad (representations of space, representative space and spatial practice) by A. Lefebvre was used to identify the codes of social transformation of the public space of the Northern Avenue. The study was carried out using a tool developed within the framework of the methodology of narrative semiotics, which made it possible to identify the structural elements of the Northern Avenue, reflected in public experience. Methods used include observation, content analysis and traditional analysis of archival / administrative records and in-depth interviews with key informants. Diagnostics of the structure of the public space of Northern Avenue demonstrates the peculiarities of the formation of public space and the ideological transformations of the urban space of post-Soviet Yerevan.

Analysis on Building Readable Image of Urban Public Spaces

2013 ◽  
Vol 409-410 ◽  
pp. 883-886
Author(s):  
Bo Xuan Zhao ◽  
Cong Ling Meng
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Space Images ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
Good Image ◽  
The Public ◽  
The City

City, is consisting of a series continuous or intermittent public space images, and every image for each of our people living in the city is varied: may be as awesome as forbidden city Meridian Gate, like Piazza San Marco as a cordial and pleasant space and might also be like Manhattan district of New York, which makes people excited and enthusiastic. To see why, people have different feelings because the public urban space ultimately belongs to democratic public space, people live and have emotions in it. In such domain, people can not only be liberated, free to enjoy the pleasures of urban public space, but also enjoy urban life which is brought by the city's charm through highlighting the vitality of the city with humanism atmosphere. To a conclusion, no matter how ordinary the city is, a good image of urban space can also bring people pleasure.

scholarly journals Studio_ L28: From a Socially Engaged Sound Art Practice to an Open Training Ground for Sonic Design Experimentation

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 ◽  
pp. 02004
Author(s):  
Caroline Claus ◽  
Burak Pak
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Spatial Politics ◽  
Urban Architecture ◽  
Vibrational Dynamics ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Planning Processes

This paper reflects the preliminary findings of a PhD research on the spatial politics and potentials of noise and vibration, and the affective or attractive and repulsive power of sonic force. We focus on the public space of a railway area in transformation in Brussels, where sonic conflicts are prevalent. To explore the affordances of a sonic urbanism as critical spatial practice and thus to break free from prevailing modes of urbanism which focus on sonic risk and vibrational nuisance − we constitute a working practice exploiting and nurturing the productive encounters between disciplines such as sound art, urbanism and urban architecture. By setting up an experimental design studio at the KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture, embedded in local auditory culture and in connection to ongoing planning processes, we aimed to facilitate an open learning ground for sonic design experimentation in the development of innovative sonic spatial tools and approaches. The studio was oriented to students of the International Master in Architecture summoned to research the multiple (sonic) vibrations of the L28 railway area, to exploit and contrast these vibrational forces, transforming them to into actions and opportunities. From a critical sonic understanding of urban space, students played and explored a contradictory role compared to the widespread noise control practices, reformulated environments, perimeters and relations of urban phenomena and searched for interactivity with vibrational dynamics that already exist in the territory.

scholarly journals Skypeography. Investigating and mapping the public mind space of urbaness

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-12
Author(s):  
Maggie McCormick
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Experimental Approach ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Public Mind ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Digital Space

‘Skypeography: investigating and mapping the public mind space of urbaness’ is an overview of the public space of Skype. This article discusses how mediation by screens is creating new urban concepts across an emerging new spatial geography and its new sociologies and cartographies. It begins by tracing an overview from perceptions of ‘city’ to experiences of ‘urbaness’ and explores the role of screens in creating a mobile state of being and a conceptualization of urban public space as transient and paradoxical mind space. The paper argues that an appropriate urban lexicon or cartographic recording is yet to be developed in relation to the public space of screens. In an increasingly visualized world, art practice has a significant role to play in exploring and mapping urban transience, movement, rhythm and paradox that forms a state of ‘urbaness’. This article explores the concept of ‘Skypeography’ through the methods and aesthetics of artistic screen research practice undertaken in the fluid space of the SkypeLab research project. Key to the research is the project to identify 100 Questions emerging out of the practice of SkypeLab. Through its experimental approach in digital space, SkypeLab poses and exposes questions arising out of the practice, about urban space itself. Through both answers and questions, SkypeLab and its ‘Skypeography’ method contribute valuable knowledge towards an understanding of new conceptual territory within a profoundly changing urbanscape.

scholarly journals VISUAL STREET ART: MESSAGES OF RIGA STENCIL GRAFFITI

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 694
Author(s):  
Normunds Kozlovs ◽  
Ilva Skulte
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Social Semiotics ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
Illegal Activity ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
The City

The modern urban space is inevitably the site of different striking messages from advertisement to graffiti. The last are used as an alternative medium of subculture, even if majority of the public fails to notice it or else interprets it, contrary to culture’s ordered world of meanings, as chaotic “dirt” more closely related to nature than culture. The discourse of messages found in the public space - on the façades of surfaces forming urban space, can be interpreted in a countercultural code and is for the subculture of graffiti itself, a battle taking place for the aesthetization of the public space. This is the answer provided by the rebellious sons to the “fathers of the city”, who possess money and power with which to design urban public space using architectural means. The generation of sons, who are excluded from this real estate discourse due to a lack of means, put into play the only thing they own, i.e. their body, which they subject to the danger of imprisonment, because graffiti is an illegal activity, which in legal terms is interpreted as vandalism, a view that also prevails within the mass media. In this paper we analyze the meaning of visual messages of Riga stencil graffiti using social semiotics' methodology (Kress & Leewen, 1996; Jewitt & Oyama, 2004). We find that the utilization of the street as an alternative and independent medium in the form of civil disobedience manifested through the translation of radical political ideas, thus to a certain extent performing the work of propaganda, is an example of creative idealism. 

Mocking Parades and the Place of Pagan Statuary in Late Antique Alexandria

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Jonathan Stutz
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Mob Violence ◽  
Visual Contact ◽  
The Public ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

AbstractWith the present paper I would like to discuss a particular form of procession which we may term mocking parades, a collective ritual aimed at ridiculing cultic objects from competing religious communities. The cases presented here are contextualized within incidents of pagan/Christian violence in Alexandria between the 4th and 5th centuries, entailing in one case the destruction of the Serapeum and in another the pillaging of the Isis shrine at Menouthis on the outskirts of Alexandria. As the literary accounts on these events suggest, such collective forms of mockery played an important role in the context of mob violence in general and of violence against sacred objects in particular. However, while historiographical and hagiographical sources from the period suggest that pagan statues underwent systematic destruction and mutilation, we can infer from the archaeological evidence a vast range of uses and re-adaptation of pagan statuary in the urban space, assuming among other functions that of decorating public spaces. I would like to build on the thesis that the parading of sacred images played a prominent role in the discourse on the value of pagan statuary in the public space. On the one hand, the statues carried through the streets became themselves objects of mockery and violence, involving the population of the city in a collective ritual of exorcism. On the other hand, the images paraded in the mocking parades could also become a means through which the urban space could become subject to new interpretations. Entering in visual contact with the still visible vestiges of the pagan past, with the temples and the statuary of the city, the “image of the city” became affected itself by the images paraded through the streets, as though to remind the inhabitants that the still-visible elements of Alexandria’s pagan topography now stood as defeated witnesses to Christianity’s victory.

scholarly journals Where the Sidewalk Ends: Automobility and Shame in Tbilisi, Georgia

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Perry Maxfield Waldman Sherouse
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Private Company ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Physical Barriers ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

In recent years, cars have steadily colonized the sidewalks in downtown Tbilisi. By driving and parking on sidewalks, vehicles have reshaped public space and placed pedestrian life at risk. A variety of social actors coordinate sidewalk affairs in the city, including the local government, a private company called CT Park, and a fleet of self-appointed st’aianshik’ebi (parking attendants) who direct drivers into parking spots for spare change. Pedestrian activists have challenged the automotive conquest of footpaths in innovative ways, including art installations, social media protests, and the fashioning of ad hoc physical barriers. By safeguarding sidewalks against cars, activists assert ideals for public space that are predicated on sharp boundaries between sidewalk and street, pedestrian and machine, citizen and commodity. Politicians and activists alike connect the sharpness of such boundaries to an imagined Europe. Georgia’s parking culture thus reflects not only local configurations of power among the many interests clamoring for the space of the sidewalk, but also global hierarchies of value that form meaningful distinctions and aspirational horizons in debates over urban public space. Against the dismal frictions of an expanding car system, social actors mobilize the idioms of freedom and shame to reinterpret and repartition the public/private distinction.

scholarly journals Nuevos usos espaciales en las estaciones ferroviarias de alta velocidad/New space use of high speed railway stations

2018 ◽  
pp. 86-105
Author(s):  
Carlos Hugo Soria Caceres
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Main Function ◽  
High Speed Rail ◽  
Railway Stations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Space

RESUMENLas infraestructuras de transporte presentes sobre el territorio condicionan las relaciones sociales y de comunicación de muchos espacios. Grandes estaciones, puertos o aeropuertos se presentan como ejes de centralidad sobre los que se distribuyen flujos de mercancías y personas, configurando a su vez el diseño y la funcionalidad de las ciudades. Hoy en día, con el avance producido en sectores como el ferrocarril de alta velocidad, las estaciones han transformado su función principal de nudo de intercambio, proyectándose como nuevos espacios comerciales y de negocio. En este artículo se analiza este nuevo fenómeno de transformación espacial y social vinculado a la alta velocidad ferroviaria, focalizando su ámbito en España. Se desgrana a su vez el papel de las comunidades sociales, políticas y empresariales para la ciudad y el espacio público presentes en las nuevas estaciones de ferroviarias. Palabras clave: ferrocarril; espacio público; urbanismo. ABSTRACTThis work aims to discuss the transport infrastructures presents on the territory and the conditions to the social and communication relations of many spaces. Large stations, ports or airports are presented as axes of centrality on which flows of goods and people are distributed, configuring in turn the design and functionality of cities. Nowadays, with the advance produced in sectors such as high-speed rail, the stations have transformed their main function as an exchange hub, projecting themselves as new commercial and business spaces. This article analyzes this new phenomenon of spatial and social transformation linked to high-speed rail, focusing its scope in Spain. At the same time, the role of the social, political and business communities for the city and the public space present in the new railway stations.Keywords: railroad; public space; urbanism.

scholarly journals The Virtual Public Thing: de-re-territorialisations of public space through shopping in Auckland’s urban space

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfredo Manfredini ◽  
Ross Jenner
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Design ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Relationship ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
De Re ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
Shopping Centres ◽  
Important Challenge ◽  
Urban Places

New recombinant factors emerging in urban public space counteract the increasing disjunction of urban places subject to commodification and privatisation. In low-density cities within neoliberal political frameworks, these factors have developed peculiar places of social relationship: the integrated urban enclosures devoted to lifestyle consumption that are the latest evolution of shopping centres. These enclosures are heterotopic places mobilised by spectacle that quickly subsume the fundamental changes occurring in the relations between architecture and associative life in our contemporary post-consumerist, digital era. The paper discusses a comparative analysis of the new mall typology recently introduced into Auckland, exploring the important challenge they pose to architecture and urban design in defining the future of public space.

Privatization of Public Space: Spatial Practice in the Umbrella Movement

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 449-459
Author(s):  
Kin-Ling Tang
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Spatial Practices ◽  
Dominant Ideology ◽  
The Public ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Representational Space ◽  
Radical Critique ◽  
Temporal Dimensions

This article argues that in order to understand the resistance potentials of taking space movements, the temporal dimensions and spatial practices implied cannot be neglected, or else there would be a tendency to be overoptimistic about resistance in these movements. Using the Umbrella Movement that took place in Hong Kong in 2014 as a case study, this article notes that representational space and spatial practice by protesters were guided by a dualistic view of the public and the private, which in turn is the dominant ideology in neoliberalism, and that their acts of resistance were not able to go beyond the confines of conceived space. In the movement, protesters reclaimed public spaces through privatizing them. Based on the work of Lefebvre, this article argues that only with a radical critique of neoliberal values embedded in capitalism including the public-private dualism can any real transformations of everyday life and hence revolution be possible.

scholarly journals Migration, Informalization and Public Space in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 150-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua Kirshner
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Local Economy ◽  
Collective Actions ◽  
Santa Cruz ◽  
Urban Public Space ◽  
Key Points

In this paper, I ask how migrant insertion into the local economy, in particular in the informal economy, has led to contestation over public space in Santa Cruz.  Related to this issue, the paper asks what sorts of collective actions are used to defend rights to the use of urban public space, and what are the key points of contention.  In my analysis, I look at theoretical connections between the informal economy and urban space, recent changes in the Santa Cruz local economy ‒including accelerated migration and the burgeoning informal economy‒ and conflicts over uses of public urban space.En este trabajo indago cómo la inserción migratoria en la economía local, particularmente en la economía informal, ha llevado a un debate sobre los usos del espacio público en Santa Cruz. En relación con esta problemática, mi trabajo explora qué tipo de acciones colectivas se utilizan para defender los derechos del uso del espacio público urbano, y cuáles son los puntos claves de conflicto. En mi análisis, exploro las conexiones teóricas entre la economía informal y el espacio urbano, los cambios recientes en la economía local de Santa Cruz ‒incluyendo la migración acelerada y la emergente economía informal‒ y los conflictos sobre usos del espacio urbano público.

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