Il disegno della città ideale: Cosmopolis

The representations of the ideal town: CosmopolisIn 1548, under the Florentine lordship of the Medici, Charles V gave Cosimo I de 'Medici the task of defending the territories of Elba and the commercial traffic of the Tyrrhenian Sea. The Duke, who strongly believed in the potential of the island and wanted to transform it into the center of Florentine rule over the Tyrrhenian, decided to fortify the ancient city of Ferraia, the current Portoferraio. A real jewel of military town planning that took the name of Cosmopolis was born by the architect Giovanni Battista Bellucci and by the engineer Giovanni Camerini. Thanks to its natural conformation, the gulf of Portoferraio protected on one side a strip of land that closes the port like a spiral, and on the other hand protected by two rocky headlands overlooking the sea, was extremely strategic and suitable for defense. Fort Stella and Fort Falcone were built in the upper part of the promontory and the Linguella tower, near the dock, all connected by a bastion wall. Later the defense was further strengthened by walls and ramparts also on the land front side according to the project of the architect Bernardo Buontalenti, transforming the city into an impregnable fortress, as well as a safe naval base. The study of urban representations of the city testifies to how the foundation of Cosmopolis for the Medici duchy was an event of extraordinary value, symbol of the strength of the Duke and his expansive abilities, symbol of an ideal city not only conceived and designed in contemporary treatises, but actually made.

Dante and the Medieval City

This chapter explores the paradox that the most sustained and influential literary representation of the medieval city is set in the afterlife. The chapter begins with a discussion of Dante’s reproduction of the vertical Christian cosmos within the horizontality of everyday life in the city. It then looks at the place of hell within this city, the types of urban experience represented within it, and the relationship of the infernal city to the heavenly city as which Dante figures paradise. The final section of the chapter surveys the dissemination of this urban model into the diverse cityscapes of Boccaccio, Chaucer, François Villon, and Christine de Pizan. The chapter concludes that late medieval urban representations are characterized by the growing insistence on the city as a site of representational difference and local autonomy that remains nevertheless deeply embedded in the spatial dynamics of verticality.

Generating and Mapping Amazonian Urban Regions Using a Geospatial Approach

(1) background: Urban representations of the Amazon are urgently needed in order to better understand the complexity of urban processes in this area of the World. So far, limited work that represents Amazonian urban regions has been carried out. (2) methods: Our study area is the Ecuadorian Amazon. We performed a K-means algorithm using six urban indicators: Urban fractal dimension, number of paved streets, urban radiant intensity (luminosity), and distances to the closest new deforested areas, to oil pollution sources, and to mining pollution sources. We also carried out fieldwork to qualitatively validate our geospatial and statistical analyses. (3) results: We generated six Amazonian urban regions representing different urban configurations and processes of major cities, small cities, and emerging urban zones. The Amazonian urban regions generated represent the urban systems of the Ecuadorian Amazon at a general scale, and correspond to the urban realities at a local scale. (4) conclusions: An Amazonian urban region is understood as a set of urban zones that are dispersed and share common urban characteristics such a similar distance to oil pollution sources or similar urban radiant intensity. Our regionalization model represents the complexity of the Amazonian urban systems, and the applied methodology could be transferred to other Amazonian countries.

Placing Ms. Marvel and Dust

The US has historically had trouble with ethnoracial formation, tensions having often boiled over when public awareness of various immigrant groups reached critical mass. Post-9/11, Muslims became the latest such “problem.” This “Muslim problem” is hotly debated in US comics culture. This chapter looks at Dust and Ms. Marvel, two post-9/11 Marvel Muslim superheroines, to show how Marvel has attempted corrective representations of Muslims and how these characters can be said to perpetuate or complicate Muslim stereotypes. Comics’ urban representations are never merely mimetic of material space, but always symbolic, selective, and ideologically informed narrative and graphic montages: a comic’s claim to real-world space is necessarily normative, taking existing spaces, and recreating it in ways that say who belongs there. This chapter focuses on how Dust and Ms. Marvel are figured in relation to New York City and its surroundings, and what that says about Muslims’ imagined right to the city.

The city in Soviet Lithuanian cinema

The article analyzes urban representations of Soviet-era Lithuanian cinema. Like any other object of reality, the city in cinema is a secondary reality, the fruit of artistic interpretation. At the same time, images of the city in film can reflect individual and collective consciousness of the period. The analysis of urban space of Lithuanian feature cinema reveals that cinematographic space can be treated as a composite construct, which creates and represents projections of identities and feelings, reflects demands, ideas, cinema fashions of its time and “hides” real sociocultural and sociopolitical discourses. Most of Soviet-style feature films much easier incorporate countryside spaces, images, landscapes and lifestyle. Meanwhile the city often not only creates an impression of a claustrophobic space, but even looks very decorative. It seems that most of filmmakers can’t identify cities with their own, Lithuanian, national living space. In search of identity or inspiration they turn to idealized village, agrarian culture and its images. Therefore, the city of Soviet Lithuanian cinema is more likely to become a space of collapsed hopes, prison, ideological repressive space, which is stuck between the present and the past. Filmmakers, like their characters, run to the shelter of nature, the mythologized, well-decorated farmstead, where archetypal father and mother figures or a calm, meditative landscape await. It seems that movie characters (and filmmakers), who have escaped from the socialist reality and its challenges to the landscapes of nature and village, have never returned.

Trajetória intelectual e identidade do educador: Anísio Teixeira (1900-1971)

Celebrar a trajetória de Anísio Teixeira é trazer para o centro das nossas reflexões momentos decisivos da nossa história da educação. Ele fez parte de uma geração de intelectuais urbanos a quem coube, sobretudo, na passagem do século 19 para o século 20, grande responsabilidade pela discussão do tema da modernidade e dos projetos políticos que lhe diziam respeito, a partir de certa visão de sociedade brasileira e de povo brasileiro. Ao trabalhar nos maiores e mais importantes centros urbanos do País, liderando as famosas reformas de instrução pública, nos anos 20 e 30, esses intelectuais criaram não só a possibilidade de estruturar um campo de identificação dos educadores mas, sobretudo, interferiram na ordenação simbólica das cidades, armando novas representações do urbano e do seu papel profissional dentro dele. Compreender o móvel dessa ação é, em parte, meu objetivo neste texto. Para tanto, tomo como caso a trajetória de Anísio Teixeira, o maior representante da tradição pedagógica democrática em nosso País. Palavras-chave: Anísio Teixeira; biografia. Abstract If still alive, Anísio Teixeira would complete one hundred years old. Celebrating his trajectory is to bring to the center of our reflections decisive moments of education history. He was part of an urban intellectual generation that, mainly lasted from the passage of 19 to the 20 century, took the responsibility of discussing the modernity of political projects from the point of view of the Brazilian society and public. Working in the major urban centers in Brazil, leading the famous public instructions reforms in the 1920's and 30's, these intellectual created not only the possibility of structuring the educators identification, but above all, they interfere in the symbolic ordination of cities, creating new urban representations and new roles for the professionals. Comprehend the mobile of this action is in part the objective of this text. For this reason, it is consider the trajectory of Anísio Teixeira, the main representative of the Pedagogical democracy tradition of our country. Keywords: Anísio Teixeira; biography.

Métodos digitales para el estudio de la fotografía compartida. Una aproximación distante a tres ciudades iberoamericanas en Instagram

En este trabajo abordamos el estudio empírico de la fotografía urbana compartida en Instagram. Estudiamos los casos de tres ciudades iberoamericanas etiquetadas como: #buenosaires, #cdmx y #madrid. Proponemos una aproximación distante (Moretti, 2007, 2015) a partir de cuatro técnicas de analítica de datos (Gandolmi y Haider, 2015) aplicadas a la investigación cultural. Indagamos acerca de los modos en que las ciudades son representadas por los usuarios en la plataforma, los usos sociales de los hahstags, y a nivel metodológico, las posibilidades de la analítica de datos para realizar un estudio sociocultural. En base al diseño metodológico y el análisis empírico establecemos conclusiones sobre los métodos de investigación basados en datos, sobre las representaciones urbanas, y sobre el uso y las prácticas de los usuarios en Instagram.In this article we address the empirical study of shared urban photography in Instagram. We study how three Iberoamerican cities, Buenos Aires, México y Madrid, are represented in the social plaftorm through a dataset of five thousands pictures labeled with the hashtags #buenosaires, #cdmx and #madrid respectively. We propose a distant approach (Moretti, 2007, 2015) based on four techniques of data analysis (Gandolmi and Haider, 2015) applied to cultural research. We inquire about the ways in which the cities are represented by the users on the platform, identifying also some social uses of hahstags. At the methodological level, we explore the possibilities of data analytics to conduct a sociocultural study. At last, we draw some conclusions about data-based research methods, the highlights of urban representations for each city in a comparative way, and the social usage of shared photography in Instagram.

Impact of Urbanization on Heavy Convective Precipitation under Strong Large-Scale Forcing: A Case Study over the Milwaukee–Lake Michigan Region

In this study, observational and numerical modeling analyses based on the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) are used to investigate the impact of urbanization on heavy rainfall over the Milwaukee–Lake Michigan region. The authors examine urban modification of rainfall for a storm system with continental-scale moisture transport, strong large-scale forcing, and extreme rainfall over a large area of the upper Midwest of the United States. WRF simulations were carried out to examine the sensitivity of the rainfall distribution in and around the urban area to different urban land surface model representations and urban land-use scenarios. Simulation results suggest that urbanization plays an important role in precipitation distribution, even in settings characterized by strong large-scale forcing. For the Milwaukee–Lake Michigan region, the thermodynamic perturbations produced by urbanization on the temperature and surface pressure fields enhance the intrusion of the lake breeze and facilitate the formation of a convergence zone, which create favorable conditions for deep convection over the city. Analyses of model and observed vertical profiles of reflectivity using contoured frequency by altitude displays (CFADs) suggest that cloud dynamics over the city do not change significantly with urbanization. Simulation results also suggest that the large-scale rainfall pattern is not sensitive to different urban representations in the model. Both urban representations, the Noah land surface model with urban land categories and the single-layer urban canopy model, adequately capture the dominant features of this storm over the urban region.