Feeding Detroit’s Rise

Author(s):  
Rebecca J. Kinney

In the fifth chapter, the book examines the story of Detroit on the rise—the ultimate conclusion of most of the disparate narratives surrounding the city. The fascination with Detroit in the twenty-first century is due not to its ruin but to the evidence of Detroit as possible. This chapter looks explicitly at the narrative of the rise of a “new Detroit.” This rise is best seen in media portrayals of as the city’s “hungry” creative class, the billion-dollar investment of Dan Gilbert, and the media frenzy around the opening of a Whole Foods Market in Detroit and the company’s use of that store as a national platform against “racism and elitism.”

Futureproof ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 227-250
Author(s):  
Jon Coaffee

This chapter focuses on futureproofing in the twenty-first century. Here, resilience is employed everywhere in the Western world as the futureproofing strategy of choice. In the light of 9/11, it became necessary to articulate how we manage and govern risk given that ‘we live, think and act in concepts that are historically obsolete but which nonetheless continue to govern our thinking and acting’. Although implementation methods differ depending on what is being made resilient, politicians constantly proclaim the need to enhance it, city planners and engineers are constantly being urged to adopt it, while individuals and communities are told they need to have more of it. Professional associations have rapidly incorporated resilience ideas into their existing frameworks of action for sustainability, risk management or emergency planning, in many cases extending their scale and ambition. Resilience has been further incorporated into the modus operandi of numerous policy communities and is almost ubiquitous in media portrayals and political sound bites of the latest crisis or disaster.


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 34-56
Author(s):  
Méropi Anastassiadou-Dumont

The article examines Muslim pilgrimages to Christian places of worship in Istanbul after the 1950s. It aims to answer whether and how the Ottoman heritage of cultural diversity fits or does not fit with the pattern of the nation-state. After a brief bibliographic overview of the issue of shared sacred spaces, the presentation assembles, as a first step, some of the key elements of Istanbul’s multi-secular links with religious practices: the sanctity of the city both for Christianity and Islam; the long tradition of pilgrimages and their importance for the local economy; meanings and etymologies of the word pilgrimage in the most common languages of the Ottoman space; and the silence of the nineteenth century’s Greek sources concerning the sharing of worship. The second part focuses more specifically on some OrthodoxGreek sacred spaces in Istanbul increasingly frequented by Muslims during the last decades.


2018 ◽  
pp. 207-214
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger

The conclusion reviews the five central components through which the book has posited connections between nineteenth- and twenty-first century habits of media consumption. It shows how “addiction” still serves as a descriptive metaphor for the consumption of information, now networked and constantly refreshing itself; how the fantasy of infinite mental retention still governs fantasies of mastering information overload; how playback has only continued to conflate memory with information storage, resulting in programmable subjects and information as a super-commodity; how digital media reproduction and circulation ironically still creates the aura of mass live events; and finally, how the media consumer’s dilemma of establishing authenticity has only become more aggravated in an era of self-branding on social media.


Author(s):  
Liz Harvey-Kattou

This chapter argues that cinema has been the primary creative vehicle to reflect on national – tico – identity in Costa Rica in the twenty-first century, and it begins with an overview of the industry. Considering the ways in which film is uniquely positioned to challenge social norms through the creation of affective narratives and through the visibility it can offer to otherwise marginalised groups, this chapter analyses four films by key directors. Beginning with an exploration of Esteban Ramírez’s Gestación, it considers youth culture, gender, and class as non-normative spaces in the city of San José. Similarly, Jurgen Ureña’s Abrázame como antes is then discussed from the point of view of its ground-breaking portrayal of trans women in the capital. Two films shot at the geographic margins of the nation are then discussed, with the uncanny coastline the focus of Paz Fábrega’s Agua fría de mar and the marginalized Afro-Costa Rican province of Limón the focus of Patricia Velásquez’s Dos aguas.


City, State ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ran Hirschl

This introductory chapter illustrates that, in many settings worldwide, hardwired constitutional arrangements reflect outdated concepts of spatial governance featuring constitutional division of competences adopted in a pre-megacity era and increasingly detached from twenty-first-century realities. Consequently, cities do not exist constitutionally. And with few exceptions, cities remain subjugated by a Westphalian constitutional order and by the state’s innate inclination to maintain jurisdictional primacy over its territory. National constitutions’ entrenched nature and innately statist outlook render the city systemically weak and to a large degree underrepresented. As extensive urbanization marches on, an ever-widening gap emerges between what is expected of a modern metropolis, and what cities can actually deliver in the absence of adequate standing, representation, taxation powers, or robust policy-making authority.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-141
Author(s):  
Peter Poiana

Christian Prigent views his writing as an effort to expose the 'parler faux' of ambient discourses and condemn the impoverishment of language and ideas by the media industry, in particular. Prigent's later texts work on the principle that the acceleration, intensification and gratification that characterize an image-driven society result in the disempowerment of its citizens. Prigent responds with a critical poetics that this study endeavours to describe with reference to two texts: Le Monde est marrant (2008) and La Vie moderne (2012). These texts devise techniques of vocal imitation (which, adopting Gérard Genette's neologism, we call mimological) as a means of addressing those techniques by which the media industry creates credulous and consumption-ready subjects. This critical poetics constitutes a system, it is argued, because it deploys a limited set of combinations as a way of figuring an aberration of an existing system. Prigent's mimetic system demonstrates how poetry offers a means of grasping the harsh realities of the twenty-first century.


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