Queering Bratislava: On Borders, Otherness and Public Space

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myrto Tsilimpounidi
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Visual Sociology ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
The City

This paper follows the multiple layers of an urban fabric that is stereotypically characterised as ‘post-socialist’, yet in essence, it is subject to ongoing transitions – much like the notion of being queer. What can we learn from queer theory in relation to post-socialist urban theory? What are the methodological advancements that derive from a queer approach to research? In this light, the presentation breaks the usually logocentric academic discourse as it engages with the premises of visual sociology. Using visual material from Bratislava focusing on urban inscriptions (street art, urban interventions), it opens up a discussion about the changes in the city and the struggles of different groups.

Queering Bratislava: On Borders, Otherness and Public Space

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Myrto Tsilimpounidi
Keyword(s):  
Queer Theory ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Academic Discourse ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Visual Sociology ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Visual Material ◽  
The City

This paper follows the multiple layers of an urban fabric that is stereotypically characterised as ‘post-socialist’, yet in essence, it is subject to ongoing transitions – much like the notion of being queer. What can we learn from queer theory in relation to post-socialist urban theory? What are the methodological advancements that derive from a queer approach to research? In this light, the presentation breaks the usually logocentric academic discourse as it engages with the premises of visual sociology. Using visual material from Bratislava focusing on urban inscriptions (street art, urban interventions) it opens up a discussion about the changes in the city and the struggles of different groups.

scholarly journals Retrofitting Obsolete Railroad Infrastructure

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corina Ardeleanu
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Open Space ◽  
Natural Areas ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Network ◽  
Ecological Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
Thesis Statement ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The City

Thesis Statement This thesis will explore the development and design opportunities related to the retrofitting of abandoned railroad corridors in post industrial cities. These lines of infrastructure will be viewed as the lifelines of the city whereby, the ramifications of main transportation arteries will impact the urban network through connectivity and the creation of public open space. This thesis will look at obsolete public railroad infrastructure, as an important fragment of the collective memory of a post-industrial city that can be reactivated to connect back into the transportation urban network. These structures will be identified as landmarks that must be preserved and incorporated into public space and amenity. The reestablishment of the railroad in this context will result in the connection of the contemporary to its past, creating more meaningful and resonant spaces. These transportation corridors will be addressed as part of expanding ecological and man-made systems, thus becoming lifelines of the city, expanding their arteries to feed life into the urban fabric. The natural areas affected by these railroads will be treated as the lungs of the city and made more accessible to the public in order to raise ecological awareness. The railroad thus creates permeability, linking urban and natural areas and reviving its former function of connectivity by re-stitching the urban fabric.

scholarly journals Possibilities to Apply the Urban Acupuncture Concept in Kaunas: Social Aspect

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 18-27
Author(s):  
Aurelija Daugelaite ◽  
Indre Gražulevičiūte-Vileniške ◽  
Mantas Landauskas
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Art ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Ecological Design ◽  
Social Aspect ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City

The concept of urban acupuncture, which has been gaining ground in recent decades, is based on the activation and revitalization of urban environments using small architectural or landscape architectural interventions in precise carefully selected locations of urban fabric. However, the rapid and unexpected design solutions of urban acupuncture, based on ecological design, nature dynamics, street art, material re-use, can cause different social and psychological reactions of urban population and these reactions may vary depending on cultural contexts. Consequently, in order to implement successful urban acupuncture projects in Lithuanian cities, it is very important to find out public opinion and priorities in the fields of public space management, aesthetics, and public art. The aim of the research was to analyze the opinion of Kaunas city residents regarding these issues. For this purpose, a sociological questionnaire survey was used. The questionnaire containing 20 questions was designed, with the aim to find out the trends of use of public spaces in the city, the attitudes of residents towards street art and other small-scale initiatives in public spaces implemented in the recent years, possibilities of creating landscape architecture based on ecological ideas in urban environment, the attitude of inhabitants towards community spaces and community space design in the city, etc. 100 residents of Kaunas participated in this online administered survey. The survey has demonstrated general positive attitude towards contemporary design trends of public spaces and public art; however, the surveyed population expressed preferences towards fully equipped public spaces offering possibilities for a wide range of activities.

scholarly journals Reviewing Premises on Public Spaces in Democratic, Inclusive, Agential Cities, Illustrated by Amsterdam

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-144
Author(s):  
Maurice Harteveld
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
General View ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The People ◽  
Municipal Autonomy ◽  
The City ◽  
Global Travel

This article highlights the dynamics of values in our reasoning on public space. By means of an epistemological study, illustrated by examples in the Dutch city of Amsterdam, it tests the contemporary premises underlying our ways to safeguard the inclusive, democratic, agential city, and, as such, it aims to update our view on public space. The article raises three subsequent main questions: [i] Is the city our common house as perceived from the Renaissance onward, containing all, and consequently are public spaces used by the people as a whole? [ii] Is the city formalising our municipal autonomy as emphasised since the Enlightenment, in an anti-egoistic manner, and in this line, are public spaces owned by local governments representing the people? And, [iii] is the city open to our general view as advocated in Modern reasoning, restricting entrepreneurial influences, and synchronically, is its public spaces seen and/or known by everyone? - Inclusiveness, democracy, and agentiality are strongholds in our scientific thinking on public space and each issue echoes through in an aim to keep cities connected and accessible, fair and vital, and open and social. Yet, conflicts appear between generally-accepted definitions and what we see in the city. Primarily based upon confronting philosophy with the Amsterdam case for this matter, the answering of questions generates remarks on this aim. Contemporary Western illuminations on pro-active citizens, participatory societies, and effects of among others global travel, migration, social media and micro-blogging forecast a more differentiated image of public space and surmise to enforce diversification in our value framework in urban theory and praxis.

scholarly journals The Contested Gallery: street art, ethnography and the search for urban understandings

AmeriQuests ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Urban Environment ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Cultural Value ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Cultural Characteristics ◽  
The Road ◽  
The City

This is a paper on street art and its role as a form of artistic insurrection that challenges popular understandings of public space and urban visual culture. I would like to think of it as a field guide to urban seeing, a means of revising the way in which we view the cityscape and its imagery. It is a way of imagining the city as a canvas onto which ideas may be inscribed and reinterpreted, where resistance percolates up to those who look for it. It is here, in what Kathleen Stewart has called a “place by the side of the road” that the work of the street artist exists, slowly gurgling up through the cracks in the sidewalk and briefly illuminated by the yellow-white glow of the street lights. Street art most often takes the form of adhesive stickers, spray-painted stencils, and wheat-pasted posters, and while it shares many similar aesthetic and cultural characteristics with graffiti, street art embodies a unique ideology. Graffiti represents a territorialization of space (‘tagging’, or reclaiming urban spaces through the use of pseudonyms as territorial markings); street art represents a reterritorialization of space. Rather than taking space, street art attempts to re-purpose the existing urban environment. This paper seeks to reflect the changing dynamic of urban space through an analysis of the practice of street art. By examining the roles that street artists play in disrupting the flow of visual noise in the city, I will illuminate the cultural value and significance of this form of urban artistic resistance.

scholarly journals A Review of Robert Shaw, The Nocturnal City. London: Routledge, 2018, 126 pр.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (48) ◽  
pp. 239-251
Author(s):  
Fedor Veselov
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Research Field ◽  
Night Time ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Artificial Lighting ◽  
The Public ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
New Research ◽  
The City

This review focuses on the book The Nocturnal City written by the British social geographer Robert Shaw. The author’s major objective is to put the night at the center of the research agenda in urban studies, to contribute to urban theory in general, and to open up a new research field — nightology. The theoretical ambition for Shaw is an attempt to establish a dialogue between planetary urbanism (critical urban theory) and the post-structuralist understanding of the city (assemblage thinking). The author employs the conceptual model of ‘three ecologies’ developed by Felix Guattari; it considers the city as consisting of three interconnected layers: ‘self — society — earth’. Another important analytical tool is the post-colonial metaphor of the night as a frontier, which Shaw develops, considering specificities of the nocturnal city: infrastructures of artificial lighting and cleaning, the night-time economy, the changing aesthetics of cities at night and the experience of night-time at home, beyond the public space. The book does not offer a ready-made solution to theoretical problems and reveals just a little of the empirical diversity of nocturnal cities, but it is recommended as an introduction to a new field — nightology (especially for the Russian social sciences) — and as an elaboration of the discussion around the compatibility of critical urbanism and assemblage thinking in urban theory.

scholarly journals 'La Escocesa': A fabric of Images

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-42
Author(s):  
Placido Munoz Moran
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Local Council ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The City

The banning of the practice of graffiti in public space since the approval of the civic regulation in 2006 has restricted the production of graffiti artworks in Barcelona. It transformed and coerced the local graffiti and street art scene towards new forms of production in the city, which are the central focus of this article.  ‘La Escocesa: A factory of images’, is based on my dialogues with the resident graffiti artists of the art centre ‘La Escocesa’ in ‘Poble Nou’. Some of these artists participated in both the creation of the graffiti scene in the 90s and the development of this practice in the city. Today they are recognized artistic figures of the local and international graffiti scene. I shared with some of these graffiti artists in the art centre some of my fieldwork experiences in connection with other local artists and representatives of the local council. In addition, I also opened up dialogues with them using anthropological examples about art and artists, the city and the space. The following section contains part of the conversations, reflexions and debates that we had.

New Urban Spaces

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Spaces ◽  
Urban Restructuring ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
Intensive Research ◽  
Spatial Strategies ◽  
Critical Urban Theory ◽  
The City

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. How can these transformations be deciphered? In this book, critical urban theorist Neil Brenner argues that confronting this challenge requires not only intensive research on urban restructuring but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit—the city or the metropolis—and explores the multiscalar constitution, political mediation, and ongoing rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric, from the local and the regional to the national and the planetary. New Urban Spaces offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban life, the role of multiscalar state spatial strategies in animating them, and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts, methods, and cartographies must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

scholarly journals INNOVACIÓN EN EL MERCADO TURÍSTICO: EXPERIENCIAS EN ARTE URBANO

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
Montse Crespi Vallbona ◽  
Oscar Mascarilla Miró
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Street Art ◽  
Art Gallery ◽  
The Public ◽  
The City ◽  
Permanent Presence

El turismo es una de las actividades que más encarecidamente precisa de la innovación y la creatividad para mantenerse constantemente en auge. Las tendencias actuales de la demanda exigen experiencias activas, que generen emociones, esten repletas de contenido, tengan dosis de placer. El arte urbano siempre presente en los espacios públicos de las ciudades, emerge como una propuesta innovadora, atendiendo a su capacidad de provocación e interacción con el peatón espectador. Barcelona es el actual laboratorio turístico en el que se lleva a cabo la denominada Pinacoteca a Cel Obert, una galeria de arte abierta que ocupa el espacio público de la ciudad, con 24 obras pictóricas clásicas en el sí de calles comerciales, en las puertas de sus establecimientos. El análisis cualitativo de la información recopilada en la encuesta a 150 visitantes y las entrevistas a los stakeholders del proyecto, conduce a determinar que esta galeria de arte urbano y su itinerario ofrecen una satisfactoria experiencia turística, repleta de emociones y vivencias. Tourism is one of the activities that most urgently requires innovation and creativity to keep its constantly booming. The current demand tendencies require active experiences, that generate emotions, experience content, doses of pleasure. The permanent presence of street art in public spaces emerge now as an innovative proposal due to its capacity of provocation and interaction with the pedestrian observar. Barcelona is the present tourism lab where the Pinacoteca a Cel Obert is implemented, an open gallery in the public space of the city, with 24 classic paintings into the street, on the business doors. Cualitative analysis of collected data in the survey to 150 visitors and the interviews to the project stakeholders, lead to conclude that this street art gallery and its itinerary offer a satisfactory tourist activity, pleint of emotions and experiences.

Deep Dérive

2019 ◽  
pp. 140-166
Author(s):  
Joshua Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Shopping Centers ◽  
Urban Fabric ◽  
Existential Crisis ◽  
High Security ◽  
The City ◽  
At Will

Chapter Six, ‘Deep Dérive,’ explores Philippe Vasset’s La conjuration [The Conjuration] (2013). Vasset’s novel depicts a Paris now fully governed by logics of capitalist urban planning and spectacle. Vasset’s would-be psychogeographer narrator suffers existential crisis in such conditions. For him, the city has reduced its users to the role of those ‘computer-generated nobodies’ who appear in the proudly displayed images of future shopping centers. However, he founds a cult that develops, to mystical proportions, the art of anonymity, until they are able to penetrate undetected into even the most high-security skyscrapers of La Défense. In the ultimate psychogeographical space-hack, the cult is thus able to ‘abolish at will the frontier between public space and private property.’ As they circulate like ‘a school of fish’ through the urban fabric, they would experience the city in all its infinite nuance. However, as their ‘powers’ grow, abstraction and eschatology ultimately depict them as having lost touch with the territory. Their true, ironic, apotheosis comes when they fully resemble those ‘computer-generated nobodies’ that had fascinated the narrator early on. Vasset’s novel is read in the light of Situationist notions of the city and Bruno Latour’s writings on panoptica and oligoptica.

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