scholarly journals Movie Palaces on Canadian Downtown Main Streets: Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul S. Moore
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Analysis ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Spatial Hierarchy ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The City ◽  
Social Uses ◽  
Main Streets

The emergence of movie palaces is traced for St. Catherine Street in Montreal, Yonge Street in Toronto, and Granville Street in Vancouver. Beginning in 1896, film shows were included in a range of urban amusement places. When dedicated movie theatres opened by 1906, they were quickly built throughout the city before the downtown "theatre districts" became well defined. Not until about 1920 were first-run vaudeville-movie palaces at the top of a spatial hierarchy of urban film-going, lasting into the 1950s. After outlining the formation of movie palace film-going, the paper notes how the downtown theatres were next to each city's major department store. A theoretical analysis of how amusement and consumption make "being downtown" significant in everyday urban life follows. A review of the social uses of electric lighting and urban amusements finds that movie palace marquees become a symbol for the organization of downtown crowds and consumers into attentive mass audiences. A brief account of the decline of the movie palace, from the 1970s to 2000, concludes by reviewing the outcomes of replacement by multiplex theatres, demolition, or preservation.

Patterns of Department Store Shoplifting

1963 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerald D. Robin
Keyword(s):  
Important Determinant ◽  
Department Store ◽  
Individual Sample ◽  
Sample Sizes ◽  
Social Nature ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The City ◽  
Stolen Goods

Varying amounts of information were obtained on every per son apprehended in 1958 for shoplifting in three large depart ment stores in Philadelphia. The individual sample sizes for Stores A, B, and C were 285, 834, and 465 cases, respectively. The following conclusions were made on the basis of the data gathered: (1) Shoplifting is primarily a juvenile activity. (2) Allowing suspected shoplifters to leave the store or store prem ises before apprehending them may be a matter of custom and a store precaution rather than a fulfillment of any legal require ment. (3) Although female apprehensions were more prevalent than male, there is little justification for regarding shoplifting as an almost exclusively female activity. (4) In comparison to their proportion in the population of the city, Negroes were dis proportionately represented in the stores' apprehension figures. (5) Juvenile theft, in terms of the retail value of the stolen goods, tended to be considerably less costly than adult theft. (6) Man agers of the stores showed an extreme reluctance to "prosecute" juveniles. (7) By far the most important determinant of the dis position of a case was the size of the theft. (8) The fact that more than seven out of every ten juveniles involved in shoplifting were apprehended in groups confirms the social nature of shop lifting among juveniles.

Lively cities made in sound: A study of the sonic sensibilities of listening and hearing in Wollongong, New South Wales

Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (10) ◽  
pp. 2131-2146
Author(s):  
Gordon Waitt ◽  
Ian Buchanan ◽  
Michelle Duffy
Keyword(s):  
New South ◽  
New South Wales ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
City Centre ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
South Wales ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

This paper seeks to better understand the lively city with reference to recent analysis of sonic affects, bodily sensations and emotions. The notion of ‘hearing contacts’, as it is usually deployed in discussion of the lively city, emphasises the social interactions with other people in a rather narrow anthropocentric way. Yet, it overlooks the diversity of felt and affective dimensions of city sounds. This paper takes up this challenge by bringing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of territory into conversation with Greimas’s semiotic square. In doing so, this paper offers a compelling theoretical framework to better understand the sonic sensibilities of listening and hearing to provide a clearer sense of how people decide to attach specific meanings to sound, and which ones they do not. The paper first reviews various theoretical approaches to sound and the city. Next, the paper turns to an ethnographic account of sound and city-centre urban life recently conducted in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. This research seeks to better understand the ways bodily dispositions to sonic affects, materials and cultural norms helped participants territorialise the city centre, distinguishing ‘energetic buzz’, ‘dead noise’, ‘dead quiet’ and ‘quiet calm’.

scholarly journals Battling "the bane of our cities": Class, territory, and the prohibition debate in Toronto, 1877

2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-48
Author(s):  
M. P. Sendbuehler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alcohol Abuse ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
The People ◽  
The Social ◽  
Local Option ◽  
Public Drinking ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Working

In the nineteenth century, the tavern was an important institution in urban working-class life. Because of the social ills associated with alcohol abuse and public drinking, there were frequent attempts to lessen the tavern's importance or to eliminate it entirely. This paper examines several tavern-related issues that emerged in Toronto in the 1870s and 1880s. The Crooks Act, passed in 1876, employed powerful measures to deal with political and temperance questions simultaneously. The intersection of class, politics, temperance, and urban life led to a territorial solution to the liquor question. These issues were dealt with by the people of Toronto in 1877, when they declined to prohibit public drinking in the city via the Dunkin Act, a local option prohibition statute of the Province of Canada.

Jerome and the Sham Christians of Rome

1997 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Curran
Keyword(s):  
Social Background ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Christian Community ◽  
Rhetorical Question ◽  
City Life ◽  
Good Family ◽  
The Social ◽  
Monastic Life ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The City

This rhetorical question was poseu by Jerome in AD 411 to challenge a young man of good family from Toulouse who was contemplating the responsibilities of monastic life. The old man of Bethlehem wrote on city life with some authority; he had achieved fame and notoriety simultaneously at the court of Pope Damasus in Rome in the 380s.2 And yet, as both men knew well, the moral and physical dangers of the city, the latter resoundingly demonstrated by the Gothic capture of Rome in the previous year, had not prompted the rejection of urban life by western Christians, save by a small and eccentric group of extreme ascetics. Jerome's praise for this group is well known, and his criticism of less committed Christians in Rome is legendary. But when one examines the uniquely vivid testimony of Jerome's letters, one can detect beneath the praise and polemic a vigorous struggle for the support of the city's elite. The social background to the struggle as revealed in Jerome's writings is the subject of this article. What emerges is a complex, contradictory and divided Christian community which Jerome unsuccessfully attempted to influence, a failure that brought final and ignominious exile from Rome.

scholarly journals Women of Fes

2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-122
Author(s):  
Emilio Spadola
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
Family Code ◽  
Mega Cities

The city of Fes, the once “bourgeois citadel” (J. Berque’s words) of Moroccoand once the world’s most populous city (1170-80), has in modernity beenunhappily bypassed for coastal trading hubs and global mega-cities. Materialand symbolic elements of Fassi power persist, however, and anthropologistRachel Newcomb’s finely researched and written ethnography identifies them in upper-middle-class women’s gender identity. In so doing, Women ofFes helps the fields of anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and Islamicstudies to illuminate the often-neglected power of class to shape gender in theMuslim Middle East and North Africa, demonstrating, not pointedly, thatclass divides women within as much as across cultures.Newcomb’s book concerns women of, not merely in, Fes, namely, a classof women of “original” Fassi families navigating the social ruins and newopportunities of daily urban life. Its disparate topics – urban rumors, women’sNGOs, reforms of the Moroccan Muslim family code (mudawanah), flexiblekinship, public space, a dépassé lounge singer – shift the book’s centerfrom class to gender and public life. Her skillful identification of class issueswithin the latter, however, gives the book a necessary coherence ...

scholarly journals Participation in Cities in Sociological Discourse

Discourse ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 46-61
Author(s):  
A. A. Beschasnaya ◽  
N. N. Pokrovskaia
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Urban Population ◽  
Social Activity ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
City Management ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City

Introduction. The social practice of participativeness, active participation in the transformation of urban space in the interests of residents, is gaining popularity among the urban population. The study of this phenomenon is interest for obvious integration with management decisions. Expanding the practice of implementing social activity of the population and studying the components of participativeness determine the goal of writing the paper-the formation of a theoretical and methodological basis for studying this phenomenon.Methodology and source. The paper presents a review of classical and modern sociological theories that reveal the potential of empirical study of aspects of the manifestation of participation of urban residents. Among the mentioned by the authors are the theory of social action, social solidarity, phenomenology, social constructivism.Results and discussion. The problematic nature of living in cities and the penetration of these problems into the daily interaction of citizens forms the origins of solidary participation of citizens-individual and private interests form collective actions-processes. Multiple individual forms of citizens' activity on urban improvement are transformed into participativeness – institutionalized joint activity. Its participants can take differentiated positions in the social structure of the urban community according to the criteria of having a diverse experience of interaction, i.e. exchange, with the urban environment and taking a position in the city management structure, which determines the level of regulated authority to make managerial decisions. The problems of urban life that are common to different categories of citizens and the typification of social activity to solve them order the interaction of participants, organize and “produce” the urban space.Conclusion. In the process of reasoning, a theoretical model of the formation of participativeness is presented, which allows us to trace the transformation of activity of the urban population into the right to the city and the formation of a favorable urban environment.

scholarly journals Participatory Infrastructures: The Politics of Mobility Platforms

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 335-346
Author(s):  
Peter T. Dunn
Keyword(s):  
User Interfaces ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Mobility ◽  
Digital Platforms ◽  
Digital Architecture ◽  
City Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
Policy Deliberation ◽  
The City

Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out.

“Hints That Are Revelations”

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-200
Author(s):  
Davy Knittle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
New York School ◽  
Planning Strategy ◽  
Social Forms ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The City ◽  
Us Cities ◽  
James Schuyler

This article reads the transformation of urban space in US cities during and since the urban renewal of the 1950s and 1960s in dialogue with queer and disability theories of access to the social and the built environment. Knittle focuses on obsolescence as an urban planning strategy used to justify the removal of buildings and people from the present, as he explores how queer and disability studies have negotiated and advocated for access to the present and the future while refusing assimilation to normative social forms. He reads across body and city scales to consider access as dynamic and to map how the ableist expectations projected onto disabled bodies in what Alison Kafer describes as a “curative imaginary” appear on the city scale as an “urban curative imaginary.” To explore resistances to obsolescence that refuse assimilation while demanding access, Knittle reads the “window poems” of queer New York School poet James Schuyler. In these poems, Schuyler documents small and large forms of urban transformation from his Manhattan apartment during the 1950s and 1960s. Schuyler’s poems, Knittle argues, model strategies for how to identify the obsolescence of normative space rather than the obsolescence of queer and disabled bodies. He uses the poems’ focus on the queer potential of how urban spaces change to argue for a queer disability urbanism that takes the dynamism of access as a precondition for negotiating equitable forms of social participation and public life.

Encounters in the Metropole

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maud S. Mandel
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Main Pole ◽  
Cultural Frameworks ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Colonial Legacies ◽  
The Common ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
Immigrant Neighborhoods

This chapter discusses how migration and settlement in Marseille in the 1950s and early 1960s illustrates the impact of colonial legacies in shaping the contours of Muslim–Jewish relations in the metropole. While Paris remained the main pole of attraction for both, Marseille's close proximity to North Africa, its Mediterranean climate, and its expanding economy meant that the city attracted thousands of repatriates and immigrants in the 1950s and 1960s. Shared cultural frameworks and the common experiences of migration and displacement meant that Muslim and Jewish newcomers often had much in common, creating the basis for convivial exchange in the mixed immigrant neighborhoods where many initially settled. Such commonalities did not, however, ensure similar processes of incorporation into French urban life. Differing relationships to the French state and levels of communal development meant that incoming Jews often not only had more resources available to them than Muslims arriving in the same period but also benefited from a local administration sympathetic to their concerns.

The city of law

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-212
Author(s):  
Kirsten Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Urban Life ◽  
Right To The City ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Spatial Justice ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Legal Construction ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

AbstractThere is now a well-established ‘spatial turn in law’. However, it remains oriented towards notions of space rather than law. How, then, to capture both the spatiality of law and the legality of space? This article draws on Bruno Latour's concept of the legal construction of the ‘social’ to explore the assemblage of the city of law. It shows how law functions as a particular form of association in urban life by tracing two key forms of urban legal association in London, the city of law. The first form is ‘legal ordering’. This seeks to order urban life through domination, and includes citadel law, police law and laws of exception. The second is ‘legal consociations’, which build new forms of urban life, such as urban rights, the rights of the city and the right to the city. Finally, the article explores the creation of a spatial justice that can build more just legal associations.

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