The Margins of Late Medieval London, 1430-1540

The Margins of Late Medieval London is a powerful study of medieval London’s urban fringe. Seeking to unpack the complexity of urban life in the medieval age, this volume offers a detailed and novel approach to understanding London beyond its institutional structures. Using a combination of experimental digital, quantitative and qualitative methodologies, the volume casts new light on urban life at the level of the neighbourhood and considers the differences in economy, society and sociability which existed in different areas of a vibrant premodern city. It focuses on the dynamism and mobility that shaped city life, integrating the experiences of London’s poor and migrant communities and how they found their place within urban life. It describes how people found themselves marginalized in the city, and the strategies they would employ to mitigate that precarious position.

What Can We Learn from Urban Crisis?

The irreversible transition towards urban living entails complex challenges and vulnerabilities for citizens, civic authorities, and the management of global commons. Many cities remain beset by political, infrastructural, social, or economic fragility, with crisis arguably becoming an increasingly present condition of urban life. While acknowledging the intense vulnerabilities that cities can face, this article contends that innovative, flexible, and often ground-breaking policies, practices, and activities designed to manage and overcome fragility can emerge in cities beset by crisis. We argue that a deeper understanding of such practices and the knowledge emerging from contexts of urban crisis may offer important insights to support urban resilience and sustainable development. We outline a simple conceptual representation of the interrelationships between urban crisis and knowledge production, situate this in the context of literature on resilience, sustainability, and crisis, and present illustrative examples of real-world practices. In discussing these perspectives, we reflect on how we may better value, use, and exchange knowledge and practice in order to address current and future urban challenges.

Signs and Emotions as the Experience of the Urban Explorer

Although we have the impression that we understand the urban texture in which we live, the city still holds surprises in the way it communicates everyday aspects, situations, and cultural history.The experience of the urban explorer, that flâneur/stroller mentioned by Guy Debord (1955) and the Situationist school, was until recently only a literary experience. The emotion of discovering the unusual in the urban daily life was communicated only in the form of textual narratives (Sinclair, 1997). Recently the psychogeographical approach to the city has become again a topic of interest. Although contemporary design transposed the behavioral codes of urban life into signs, it did not propose emoticons for the phenomenological experience of one who experiences the city. The original purpose of this paper is to translate the phenomenological experience of the urban explorer into infographics (which translates complex concepts into signs with condensed meaning) and to quantify and communicate emotionally and visually, the experience of the "invisible" [out of sight] cultural details to the hurried passerby. This paper will discuss the phenomenological (psychogeographical) experience of the city transferred into visual signs will be presented. The authors insist on the communicative value of infographics in making visible the hidden beauty of the city, the historical and esthetical details that are not seen by the passersby on the street, proposing a new urban visual language accompanied by visual design theory and cultural history explanations.

Architecture and the Urban Life of Cairo

When it comes to Cairo, there is a plethora of writing taking place amid its streets and alleyways. Trying to make sense of, and structure, such an immense output is quite a difficult task. However, this article aims to highlight some significant writings that would offer those interested in Cairo’s architecture an opportunity to learn more about the city and its built environment. My intent is also to expand the scope of the inquiry. Rather than simply focusing on specific buildings, I seek to include the broader urban context and also look at the socioeconomic conditions that gave rise to important structures. I start with a review of some major texts that have looked at the city from different perspectives and, in doing so, shed light on the city’s urban and architectural development. It is interesting to note that for the most part, authors in this section do not come from an architectural or urban-planning background. Instead they write from a historical, economic, and geographic perspective. Following this, I look at a variety of other sources and writings that have appeared in edited books and book chapters. I have also included journal articles, since they offer an in-depth examination of certain buildings and the city’s overall urban growth. In addition to writings about the city, I also sought to capture its “urban imaginary” (i.e., the extent to which its built environment has been represented by writers, filmmakers, and artists). To that end, a section is dedicated toward a review of key works and the extent to which they have shed valuable insights into Cairo’s past, present, and future. The city’s urban imaginary is also portrayed through the medium of film, which allows for a conveyance of a visual narrative that evokes the sight and sounds of the city. Here I review key articles discussing the representation of the city through cinema, which is then followed by a filmography of major movies released since the late 20th century. Last, I review online resources, offering researchers material about the city’s architecture and urban environment in the form of images, maps, and drawings, in addition to blogs discussing Cairo’s rich history as well as modern problems.

Knowledge Society

This chapter is developed along three conceptual axes: citizenship; knowledge society: transparency; and trust and participation. It begins by explaining the concept of citizenship and its historical roots, the Greek polis and the Roman civitas; the revival of cities in the Late Middle Ages and their consolidation in the Modern Age. It analyzes the citizenship construct with the affirmation of each inhabitant as a citizen involved in improving the several plans of the quality of urban life. The second axis evaluates the characteristics of knowledge societies as promoting factors to a citizenship based on socio-political indicators that build trust between the citizen. The third axis deals with transparency and trust as active disseminators of timely and relevant information to the public and its impact on corruption, as a barrier against a broad citizenship. At the methodological level, the study combines bibliographic research with a field research by questionnaire.

Dreams of Flight

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

Revisiting the Mesopotamian City: a Drawing of its Inhabitants' Mental- Image

Mesopotamian cities were formed sometime during the fourth millennium BCE, and many of them continued to be inhabited as much as 3000 years. While urban characteristics of these cities has been extensively studied, the current article is concerned with exploring the inhabitants' daily experience in the city; a subject that has not been sufficiently explored despite its importance in urban studies. The objective is to expand the understanding of the relation between the ancient city and its occupants. The paper adopts the concept of the City Image as introduced in the seminal work of Kevin Lunch "Image of The City" in investigating aspects of the Mesopotamian city that qualifies it to form a strong mental Image for her citizens, derived from the legibility of its elements and the structure they form. Using a descriptive analytical method in reviewing previous literature, the research first clarifies the shared characters of Mesopotamian cities, and addresses the stature of the city in Mesopotamians' culture. I then specify the five urban elements of the city image as categorised by Lynch; paths, nodes, edges, districts and landmarks, in addition to addressing manifestations of the citizens' urban life in the Mesopotamian city. Afterward, visualization of the citizen's daily experience through the urban fabric of the city is provided, to arrive at a conclusion of the Legibility of the mental image of the Mesopotamian city in the perception of its citizens.

On the Fringes of Urban Justice: Violence and Environmental Risks in Guatemala City

Living in the city’s ravines is the common destiny of thousands of poor urban dwellers in Guatemala City, as is too often the case elsewhere in the Global South. The ravines surrounding the city represent one of the most visible and unjust urban spaces in the nation’s capital. At the same time, Guatemala City has been among the most violent cities in the world and is highly vulnerable to climate change. Employing a critical spatial perspective and drawing on interviews in two at‐risk communities—Arzú and 5 de Noviembre—this article examines the social production of such peripheral spaces. The levels of exclusion and inequalities are analysed by focusing on the multiple manifestations (visible and invisible) of violence and environmental risks, and deciphering the complex dynamics of both issues, which in turn generate more unequal and harmful conditions for residents. This article draws on the theoretical ideas elaborated by Edward Soja, Mustafa Dikeç, and Teresa Caldeira on the contextualisation of spatial injustice and peripheral urbanisation to study the specific conditions of urban life and analyse the collective struggles of people in both communities to improve their current living conditions and mitigate the risk and the precariousness of their existence. The article underlines the need to make the processes of urban exclusion and extreme inequality visible to better understand how they have been socially and politically constructed. The research argues for more socially and ecologically inclusive cities within the process of unequal urbanisation.