Perspectives on the Women Literary Travelers

This chapter aims to analyze the novels Mrs, Dalloway (1925) and Quarenta Dias (2014) in the perspective of elucidating the view of the woman writer-character-traveller on the city, showing continuities and ruptures between the modern city and the contemporary city. Therefore, three paths of analysis are proposed: (1) the understanding of urban territories as a way of elaborating subjectivities and experiences; (2) the link between city and memory, place and identity; (3) the link between city and memory, place, identity, and gender. It was possible to verify that both in Mrs. Dalloway and in Forty Days, women have a central role in the construction of narratives about the city and that this is placed in a centrality-character.

Walking as an intervention

How to analyze urban areas in the contemporary modern city upon the plurality of forms of appropriation of public spaces? This paper seeks to contribute to qualitative studies on urban perception through the method of cartography. Thus, this writing does not deal with the search for information or data collection, but with the immersion in the ongoing process present in the territory of the old railway bed in the city of Bauru-SP. The text highlights a research practice little explored in this spatial cutout, which tends to contribute to the impact on urban perception and future interventions in this area, as the decanted sociospatial layers are revolved and an urban imaginary little explored is accessed through the development as a research modality.

A MODERN CITY. LIVING REALITIES OF HISTORY

The article is devoted to the reality of the modern historical city in the totality of the actual values of the valuable heritage, traces of the past, mental codes, archetypal images and the memory of civilization. The place of history in today’s socio-cultural fi eld and in the professional context is not clearly defi ned. Together with the understanding of the need to preserve the heritage, traces and memory of the past, there are global trends that mediate the features of the glocal in architecture. However, even this compromise cannot fully demonstrate the complexity of the historical city viability. According to the author, it is necessary to search for reasons that sometimes appear outside the material reality, but address directly to the spiritual world and mental space of a person, which is the main purpose of the article. The emphasis is placed on the artistic dimension of environmental realities, which allows us to determine the living connections of history and modernity on the basis of the author’s concept of artc integration. The article is illustrated by some results of cooperation between the Nizhny Novgorod State University of Architecture and Civil Engineering and the Polytechnic University of Milan (Politecnico di Milano) in the fi eld of reconstruction and renovation of historically valuable territories and author’s photographs.

THE PROBLEM OF INTERACTION OF A MODERN CITY AND TEMPORARY ECOLOGICAL VILLAGE IN THE CONDITIONS OF GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL DISASTERS

The modern technogenic civilization is faced with global problems in the form of a threat to the further development of mankind. In connection with the critical situation, the principle of sustainable urban development was put forward as the main form of population settlement at this historical stage. The authors identified the problem of organizing temporary ecovillages to overcome the pandemic, and in general - to compensate for the lack of a clean ecological environment in relation to urban residents.

Milan and its lost river: when surviving images represent unique narrations of invisible relationships

One of the most predictable implications of photography consists of the ability to fix some images returning them in a variable timeframe for the observation. In all the major world cities, it is common to incur in some book where recent photos are compared to old ones searching the same point of view in order to make the comparison more accurate and stimulate the critical ability of the observer. An exercise that sometimes stimulates a sort of regret for the past, pointing out a diffused excess of nostalgia for times gone by. Nevertheless, the reality and meaning of modern city images are not always so prosaic. What happens when photographs are evocative of a reality that is completely lost in the collective imaginary even though it still exists and functions, despite being forgotten and buried in the depths of the city? This is the case of very few pictures capable of telling the story of a city, Milan, and its only “real” river, the Olona, whose waters, humiliated and rejected, continue to flow in total amnesia. It is a different story when photography does not have the role of nourishing nostalgia, but the power to make visible and explain the variation of a presence and its progressive obliteration. Some pictures testify to the passage from the bucolic amenity of the river and its banks in a pre-urban context to a muscular urban infrastructure. A rigid channelized river, shown with confidence, is trying to keep its presence, until the moment of its inevitable decline and disappearance. It is in these images that the possibility of reconsidering the Olona as a part of the new project for the city lies.

Future Shift for ‘Big Things’: From Starchitecture via Agritecture to Parkitecture

This article analyses three recent shifts in what called the geography of ‘Big Things’, meaning the contemporary functions and adaptability of modern city centre architecture. We periodise the three styles conventionally into the fashionable ‘Starchitecture’ of the 1990s, the repurposed ‘Agritecture’ of the 2000s and the parodising ‘Parkitecture’ of the 2010s. Starchitecture was the form of new architecture coinciding with the rise of neo-liberalism in its brief era of global urban competitiveness prevalent in the 1990s. After the Great Financial Crash of 2007–2008, the market for high-rise emblems of iconic, thrusting, skyscrapers and giant downtown and suburban shopping malls waned and online shopping and working from home destroyed the main rental values of the CBD. In some illustrious cases, ‘Agritecture’ caused re-purposed office blocks and other CBD accompaniments to be re-purposed as settings for high-rise urban farming, especially aquaponics and hydroponic horticulture. Now, COVID-19 has further undermined traditional CBD property markets, causing some administrations to decide to bulldoze their ‘deadmalls’ and replace them with urban prairie landscapes, inviting the designation ‘Parkitecture’ for the bucolic results. This paper presents an account of these transitions with reference to questions raised by urban cultural scholars such as Jane M. Jacobs and Jean Gottmann to figure out answers in time and space to questions their work poses.

De advocaat in de vroegmoderne stedelijke justitie

Hermanus Noordkerk was a famous barrister in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. After his death multiple necrologies were written in which the general tone was laudatory. This article investigates the reliability of the necrologies by answering the question why Noordkerk became such a famous barrister. What qualities did he have that made him so memorable? It becomes clear that together with his virtuous character Noordkerk was considered to be an inventive lawyer as well as an outstanding pleader and that, by combining these three characteristics, he embodied for contemporaries the ideal barrister. But besides, Noordkerk had another quality: he had the ability to exploit the public interest of a court case for the benefit of his client. Due to the political dynamics within an early modern city this might have been important for Noordkerk’s fame. The case study of Noordkerk thus sheds light on the qualities that a barrister should have in an early modern city.

Automobility and its development prospects in a modern city

The car continues to play an important role in urban mobility, providing comfort, speed and flexibility. The concept of «mobility as a service», which is increasingly developing in modern megacities, changes the consumer value of the car and offers new models of automobility based on the distributed economy. The article systematizes the basic concepts of automobility and describes modern models of "automobility as a service".