scholarly journals Explaining The Power Relations of The Actors of Production and Reproduction of The Urban Space of Abbas-Abad lands in Tehran

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (37) ◽  
pp. 99-120
Author(s):  
Nayer Farabi Asl ◽  
Mojtaba Rafieian ◽  
Sayed Mohammadreza Khatibi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations

Encounters Across Borders. Modernist Ideas and Professional Practices in the 1970s Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 399-420
Author(s):  
Mara Mărginean
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Third World ◽  
Professional Knowledge ◽  
Knowledge Flows ◽  
Professional Practices ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
Urban Policies ◽  
European Culture

Building on several international professional meetings of architects organized in Romania or abroad, this article details how various modernist principles, traditionally subsumed to Western European culture, were gradually reinterpreted as an object of policy and professional knowledge on urban space in the second and third world countries. The article analyses the dialogue between Romanian architects and their foreign colleagues. It highlights how these conversations adjusted the hierarchies and power relations between states and hegemonic centres of knowledge production. In this sense, it contributes to the recent research on the means by which the "trans- nationalization of expertise" "transformed various (semi)peripheral states into new centres of knowledge and thus outlines a new analytical space where domestic actions of the Romanian state in the area of urban policies are to be analysed not as isolated practices of a totalitarian regime, but as expressions of the entanglements between industrialization models, knowledge flows and models of territoriality that were not only globally relevant, but they also often received specific regional, national and local forms.

scholarly journals « It’s Never Just One Road » : Genga-Idowu et la prostitution dans l’espace urbain de Nairobi

2013 ◽  
pp. 50-56
Author(s):  
Colomba Muriungi
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Economic Power ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Potential Alternative ◽  
The City

My article is a reading of Genga-Idowu’s Lady in Chains with an intention to show how she attempts to rewrite the presentation of the prostitute figure in a Kenyan urban space by figuring prostitution as an institution that is useful in questioning and revising economic power relations between men and women. Genga-Idowu shows that women can reliably accumulate income from prostitution and emancipate themselves from the economic disadvantages of postcolonial Kenya. I examine specific traits of the prostitute figure and the spaces within the city that this writer utilizes to revise and disavow Kenyan male writers and socio-cultural conception of the prostitute. Thus prostitution will be projected as a business and a potential alternative road that makes women economically powerful and frees them from other kinds of disadvantages that characterize their lives.

scholarly journals Manchester’s Post-punk Heritage: Mobilising and Contesting Transcultural Memory in the Context of Urban Regeneration

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Brunow
Keyword(s):  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
City Branding ◽  
Creative City ◽  
Industrial Cities ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Memory Culture ◽  
Heritage Industry

Urban memories are remediated and mobilised by different - and often conflicting - stakeholders, representing the heritage industry, municipal city branding campaigns or anti-gentrification struggles. Post-punk ‘retromania’ (Reynolds 2011) coincided with the culture-led regeneration of former industrial cities in the Northwest of England, relaunching the cities as creative clusters (Cohen 2007, Bottà 2009, Roberts & Cohen 2014, Roberts 2014). Drawing on my case study of the memory cultures evolving around Manchester‘s post-punk era (Brunow 2015), this article shows how narratives and images travel through urban space. Looking at contemporary politics of city branding, it examines the power relations involved in adapting (white homosocial) post-punk memories into the self-fashioning of Manchester as a creative city. Situated at the interface of memory studies and film studies, this article offers an anti-essentialist approach to the notion of ‘transcultural memory’. Examining the power relations involved in the construction of audiovisual memories, this article argues that subcultural or popular memories are not emancipatory per se, but can easily tie into neoliberal politics. Moreover, there has been a tendency to sideline or overlook feminist and queer as well as Black and Asian British contributions to post-punk culture. Only partially have such marginalised narratives been observed so far, for instance in Carol Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years (2000) or by the Manchester Digital Music Archive. The article illustrates how different stakeholders invest in subcultural histories, sustaining or contesting hegemonic power relations within memory culture. While being remediated within various transmedia contexts, Manchester’s postpunk memories have been sanitised, fabricating consensus instead of celebrating difference.

scholarly journals The PST Project, Willie Herrón’s Street Mural Asco East of No West (2011) and the Mural Remix Tour: Power Relations on the Los Angeles Art Scene

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 671-695
Author(s):  
Eva Zetterman
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Fine Art ◽  
East Los Angeles ◽  
Performance Group ◽  
Standard Time ◽  
Art Scene ◽  
Conceptual Performance

This article departs from the huge art-curating project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A., 1945–1980, a Getty funded initiative running in Southern California from October 2011 to April 2012 with a collaboration of more than sixty cultural institutions coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. One of the Pacific Standard Time (PST) exhibitions was Asco: Elite of the Obscure, A Retrospective, 1972–1987, running from September to December 2011 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). This was the first retrospective of a conceptual performance group of Chicanos from East Los Angeles, who from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s acted out critical interventions in the politically contested urban space of Los Angles. In conjunction with the Asco retrospective at LACMA, the Getty Foundation co-sponsored a new street mural by the Chicano artist Willie Herrón, paying homage to his years in the performance group Asco. The PST exhibition program also included so-called Mural Remix Tours, taking fine art audiences from LACMA to Herrón’s place-specific new mural in City Terrace in East Los Angeles. This article analyze the inclusion in the PST project of Herrón’s site-specific mural in City Terrace and the Mural Remix Tours to East Los Angeles with regard to the power relations of fine art and critical subculture, center and periphery, the mainstream and the marginal. As a physical monument dependent on a heavy sense of the past, Herrón’s new mural, titled Asco: East of No West, transforms the physical and social environment of City Terrace, changing its public space into an official place of memory. At the same time, as an art historical monument officially added to the civic map of Los Angeles, the mural becomes a permanent reminder of the segregation patterns that still exist in the urban space of Los Angeles.

The Prevailing Disease: Foucault on the Institutional Meaning of Epidemics and Compact Models of Power Relations

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Historical Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Compact Models ◽  
Complex Relationships

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s work with the social history of medicine and evaluates its potential for analyzing the political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foucault reveals the bond between quarantine measures in European cities and the gradual perfection of techniques of power. He uses organized anti-epidemic activities applied to leprosy and plague as examples of “compact models” of power relations that he discusses in terms of exclusion and discipline. He reveals complex relationships between the physical body of an individual and what he calls the “social body” of a state. Foucault describes how “health policy” was formed during the second half of 18th century when it drastically changed urban space and became one of the key techniques of government. In Foucault’s lectures published as Security, Territory, Population, he turns to the concept of a “prevailing” or literally “reigning” disease. The countermeasures against the disease enable the development of special techniques applicable to the population in a given historical period. He uses the statistical description of patients suffering from smallpox as an example of how a regime of power and government of the population develops by invoking security and risk assessment. In the concluding section, the author estimates the potential of Foucauldian historical analysis as a tool for anticipating the tendencies inherent in the techniques of power mobilized to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Whose interest finally counts? The statutory production of urban space at the fringes of Dhaka, Bangladesh

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahadat Hossain ◽  
Kirsten Hackenbroch
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Urban Fringe ◽  
Project Implementation ◽  
Housing Project ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
Public Resource ◽  
Public Resources

In this article, we build our theoretical arguments on an empirical account of a state-implemented housing project in the periphery of Dhaka. Thus, we elaborate on a set of bureaucratic acts, the existing power relations, and group interests that influence planning practices and condition people’s access to public resources. Analyzing the process of project implementation, we explain the various resources and strategies that those in relatively powerful positions activate in order to considerably influence planning practice and public resource distribution. We specifically analyze how the strategies and discourses employed to bring the project forward influence the emerging spatialities and issues of socio-spatial justice and inequality at Dhaka’s urban fringe. This article thus provides empirical evidence explaining the impossibility of rigid statutory planning. Finally, we reflect on what urban planning needs to acknowledge in order for positive change.

Patterns of self-organization in the context of urban planning: Reconsidering venues of participation

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Efrat Eizenberg
Keyword(s):  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Physical Space ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Urban Change ◽  
Urban Residents ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Power And Agency

This article unpacks the relations that exist between the planning institution and urban residents by examining processes of self-organization in planning. Approaching self-organization with the lens of assemblage, the article proposes three categories or patterns of self-organization of different urban actors and portrays how they act in different forms to induce urban change. The three self-organization categories are as follows: (1) self-organization by the disenfranchised for basic rights, (2) self-organization by the ordinary for community interests, and (3) self-organization by the powerful for economic gains. In these different forms of self-organization, power and agency are differentially constituted by the relations between the residents, the planning institution, and the physical space. Moreover, the impacts of these actions on the urban space vary. Nevertheless, there are also some resemblances between groups and actions that are commonly dissociated. Unpacking different manifestations of self-organization in urban planning proposes a more relational interpretation that emphasizes the inextricable and overlapping relations of formal and informal planning and of top-down and bottom-up planning, and surfaces a different understanding of urban power relations.

Commodification of the Egyptian New Capital: A Semio-Foucauldian Landscape Analysis

2021 ◽  
pp. 120633122199132
Author(s):  
Rania Magdi Fawzy
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Landscape Analysis ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Contested Space ◽  
Semiotic Resources

Signs in the urban landscapes are never neutral; they always enact connections to power relations and social hierarchies. By examining the New Administrative Capital of Egypt’s (NAC) advertising billboards, the current study relates itself to the literature of Linguistic Landscape (LL). The study examines the NAC from a semio-discursive perspective. More specifically, it relies on the tools of Semiotic Landscape (SL) to discuss how the landscape of Cairo is represented as a heterogeneous contested space, and how the semiotic resources of its real-estate billboards epitomize Foucauldian principles of heterotopia. The study maintains that the different semiotic resources deployed in the NAC billboards commodify urban space by indexing heterotopic power relations. It is found that spatial commodification of the New Capital is embodied in two heterotopic tropes: “silent” space and “carnival” space. That is, the NAC billboards promote the consumption of the urban space by selling the heterotopic experiences of silence, and carnival-like tempo-spatiality. The study has found that the space of the NAC is semiotically presented in the landscape of Cairo as heterotopic through promoting “different” spatial experiences. To put it differently, the NAC billboards are perceived as antithesis to their landscapes of emplacement, the landscape of Cairo.

scholarly journals An urban political ecology of Bangkok's awful traffic congestion

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 732-758
Author(s):  
Danny Marks
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Traffic Congestion ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Urban Transport ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Limited Power ◽  
Bus System

Urban political ecology (UPE) can contribute important insights to examine traffic congestion, a significant social and environmental problem underexplored in UPE. Specifically, by attending to power relations, the production of urban space, and cultural practices, UPE can help explain why traffic congestions arises and persists but also creates inequalities in terms of environmental impacts and mobility.  Based on qualitative research conducted in 2018, the article applies a UPE framework to Bangkok, Thailand, which has some of the world's worst congestion in one of the world's most unequal countries. The city's largely unplanned and uneven development has made congestion worse in a number of ways. Further, the neglect of public transport, particularly the bus system, and the highest priority given to cars has exacerbated congestion but also reflects class interests as well as unequal power relations. Governance shortcomings, including fragmentation, institutional inertia, corruption, and frequent changes in leadership, have also severely hindered state actors to address congestion. However, due to the poor's limited power, solutions to congestion, are post-political and shaped by elite interests. Analyses of congestion need to consider how socio-political relations, discourses, and a city's materiality shape outcomes.Key Words: urban transport governance, Bangkok traffic congestion, urban political ecology, Thailand political economy, Bangkok's bus system

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