Post-Traumatic Urbanism

Post-Traumatic Urbanism
Author: Adrian Lahoud
Publisher: Academy Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2010-11-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780470744987

POST-TRAUMATIC URBANISM Urban trauma describes a condition where conflict or catastrophe has disrupted and damaged not only the physical environment and infrastructure of a city, but also the social and cultural networks. Cities experiencing trauma dominate the daily news. Images of blasted buildings or events such as Hurricane Katrina exemplify the sense of 'immediate impact'. But how is this trauma to be understood in its aftermath, and in urban terms? What is the response of the discipline to the post-traumatic condition? On the one hand, one can try to restore and recover everything that has passed, or otherwise see the post-traumatic city as a resilient space poised on the cusp of new potentialities. While repair and reconstruction are automatic reflexes, the knowledge and practices of the disciplines need to be imbued with a deeper understanding of the effect of trauma on cities and their contingent realities. This issue will pursue this latter approach, using examples of post-traumatic urban conditions to rethink the agency of architecture and urbanism in the contemporary world. Post-traumatic urbanism demands of architects the mobilisation of skills, criticality and creativity in contexts in which they are not familiar. The post-traumatic is no longer the exception; it is the global condition.

Visions and Revisions

Visions and Revisions
Author: Bryoni Trezise
Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2014-02-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 8763540703

In 1983 US president Ronald Reagan told the Israeli Prime Minister that he, as a photographer during World War II, had documented the atrocities of the concentration camps on film. The story was later exposed as a fraud as it was revealed that Reagan had resided in Hollywood during the entire war. Does this mean that Reagan was simply an amoral liar or that he established a connection to the Holocaust that can be said to have evolved from the intersection between “real” and “reel”?

Visions and Revisions. Performance, Memory, Trauma brings the fields of performance studies and trauma studies together in conversation in order to investigate how these two fields both “envision” and “revision” one another in relation to crucial themes such as trauma, testimony, witness, and spectatorship. According to Peggy Phelan, a leading performance studies scholar, performance provides a unique model for witnessing events that are both unbearably real and beyond reason’s ability to grasp – traumatic events like the Holocaust. While Reagan’s claim is obviously both paradoxical and problematic, it opens up a space in which the potential insights that performance studies and trauma studies might bring to one another become particularly visible.

The first half of the anthology focuses on issues of spectatorship, specifically its ethics and the possibility of witnessing. The second half widens the discussion to include memory more broadly, shifting the emphasis from sight to site, and particularly to site-specific works and the embodied encounters they model, enable and enact. The contributors here fill a critical gap, raising questions about how popular and mediatized performances that memoralize trauma might be viewed through performance theory. They also look at how performance studies might shift its focus from the visual to the sensorial and material and in doing so, they offer a fresh perspective on both performance and trauma studies.

Writing from different disciplinary vantages and drawing on multiple case studies from South Africa, the former Soviet Union, Lebanon and Thailand, among others, the contributors decolonize trauma studies and make us question, how and where our own eyes and bodies are positioned as we revision the scenes before us.

Contributors: Laurie Beth Clark/Helena Grehan/Geraldine Harris/ Chris Hudson/Petra Kuppers/Adrian Lahoud/Sam Spurr/Christine Stoddard/Bryoni Trezise/Maria Tumarkin/Caroline Wake.

Editors: Bryoni Trezise is a lecturer in theatre and performance studies at the University of New South Wales, where Caroline Wake is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia.

Explorations in Urban Design

Explorations in Urban Design
Author: Matthew Carmona
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 857
Release: 2017-05-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317137523

Whilst recognising that distinctly different traditions exist within the study and practice of urban design, this book advances an interdisciplinary and innovative approach, which is of direct importance to understanding the urban forms, conditions, practices and processes. It enthuses and inspires users who are grappling with urban design research problems, but who need inspiration to move from idea to methodological approach. Through the work of 32 urban researchers from the arts, sciences and social sciences, it demonstrates a wide range of problems and approaches and shows how the diverse range of complementary approaches can come together to provide a holistic understanding to the design of cities. While each of the contributors presents a particular approach to researching the field, sometimes focusing centrally on particular research methodologies, others cutting across methods, or focusing on theory, all include discussion of actual research projects to illustrate their application to 'real world' problems. This book will be valuable to everyone from the informed undergraduate student about to embark on their first dissertation, to PhD students and seasoned researchers immersed in methodological and conceptual complexity and wishing to compare available and appropriate methodological paths.

Trauma Informed Placemaking

Trauma Informed Placemaking
Author: Cara Courage
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 453
Release: 2024-04-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 104001769X

Trauma Informed Placemaking offers an introduction to understanding trauma and healing in place. It offers insights that researchers and practitioners can apply to their place-based practice, learning from a global cohort of place leaders and communities. The book introduces the ethos and application of the trauma-informed approach to working in place, with references to historical and contemporary trauma, including trauma caused by placemakers. It introduces the potential of place and of place practitioners to heal. Offering 20 original frameworks, toolkits and learning exercises across 33 first- and third-person chapters, multi-disciplinary insights are presented throughout. These are organised into four sections that lead the reader to an awareness of how trauma and healing operate in place. The book offers a first gathering of the current praxis in the field – how we can move from trauma in place to healing in place – and concludes with calls to action for the trauma-informed placemaking approach to be adopted. This book will be essential reading for students, researchers and practitioners interested in people and places, from artists and architects, policy makers and planners, community development workers and organisations, placemakers, to local and national governments. It will appeal to the disciplines of human geography, sociology, politics, cultural studies, psychology and to placemakers, planners and policymakers and those working in community development.

The Spatiality of Violence in Post-war Cities

The Spatiality of Violence in Post-war Cities
Author: Emma Elfversson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2020-05-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1000062988

The Spatiality of Violence in Post-war Cities analyses violence in post-war cities from different perspectives and in different parts of the world, with a shared attention to space and how it affects violent dynamics. The world is urbanising rapidly and cities are increasingly held as the most important arenas for sustainable development. Cities emerging from war are no exception, but across the globe, many post-war cities are ravaged by residual or renewed violence, which threatens progress towards peace and stability. This volume addresses why such violence happens, where and how it manifests, and how it can be prevented. It includes contributions that are informed by both post-war logics and urban particularities, that take intra-city dynamics into account, and that adopt a spatial analysis of the city. They focus on cases around the world, including Medellín (Colombia), Johannesburg (South Africa) and Mitrovica (Kosovo). The volume makes a threefold contribution to the research agenda on violence in post-war cities. First, the contributions nuance our understanding of the causes and forms of the uneven spatial distribution of violence, insecurities, and trauma within and across post-war cities. Second, the collection demonstrates how urban planning and the built environment shape and generate different forms of violence in post-war cities. Third, the contributions explore the challenges, opportunities, and potential unintended consequences of conflict resolution in violent urban settings. Providing novel insights into the causes and dynamics of violence in post-war cities, and challenges and opportunities for violence reduction, The Spatiality of Violence in Post-war Cities will be of great interest to scholars of peace, violence, conflict and its resolution, urban studies, built environment and planning. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of Third World Thematics.

Many Urbanisms

Many Urbanisms
Author: Martin J. Murray
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 693
Release: 2022-02-15
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0231555350

Winner, 2023 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Now, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s population lives in cities. But urbanization is accelerating in some places and slowing down in others. The sprawling megacities of Asia and Africa, as well as many other smaller and medium-sized cities throughout the “Global South,” are expected to continue growing. At the same time, older industrial cities in wealthier countries are experiencing protracted socioeconomic decline. Nonetheless, mainstream urban studies continues to treat a handful of superstar cities in Europe and North America as the exemplars of world urbanism, even though current global growth and development represent a dramatic break with past patterns. Martin J. Murray offers a groundbreaking guide to the multiplicity, heterogeneity, and complexity of contemporary global urbanism. He identifies and traces four distinct pathways that characterize cities today: tourist-entertainment cities with world-class aspirations; struggling postindustrial cities; megacities experiencing hypergrowth; and “instant cities,” or master-planned cities built from scratch. Murray shows how these different types of cities respond to different pressures and logics rather than progressing through the stages of a predetermined linear path. He highlights new spatial patterns of urbanization that have undermined conventional understandings of the city, exploring the emergence of polycentric, fragmented, haphazard, and unbounded metropolises. Such cities, he argues, should not be seen as deviations from a norm but rather as alternatives within a constellation of urban possibility. Innovative and wide-ranging, Many Urbanisms offers ways to understand the disparate forms of global cities today on their own terms.

The New Structuralism

The New Structuralism
Author: Rivka Oxman
Publisher: Academy Press
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2010-08-23
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Today the convergence of design, engineering and architectural technologies is breeding a new material practice in experimental architecture. The significant emphasis on the structuring logic of tectonics is resulting in a 'new structuralism' in design. In this pioneering publication, this important shift is fully defined as a highly dynamic synthesis of emerging principles of spatial, structural and material ordering integrated through the application of materialisation and fabrication technologies. Providing the foundations for a new theory of structuring in architecture, the new structuralism has broad implications for the way we both conceive and undertake architectural design, as its impact starts to emanate not only across education internationally, but also through architectural research and practice. Features premier research and design-oriented engineering practices: Bollinger + Grohmann Buro Happold Hanif Kara (AKT) Werner Sobek Focuses on design and fabrication technologies in the recent work of: Martin Bechthold Barkow Leibinger EMBT (Enric Miralles, Benedetta Tagliabue) Gramazio & Kohler Fabian Scheurer (designtoproduction) Yves Weinand and Markus Hudert Contributors include: John Chilton Dominik Holzer and Steven Downing Neri Oxman Helmut Pottmann Nina Rappaport

Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema

Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema
Author: Addamms Mututa
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 172
Release: 2021-10-09
Genre: Science
ISBN: 100046220X

This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.

London (Re)generation

London (Re)generation
Author: David Littlefield
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 139
Release: 2012-04-30
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1119993784

A lively, thought-provoking exploration of the contemporary regeneration of London Plans to regenerate East London and transform the capital are integral to the vision of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. This title brings into focus notions of regeneration within the specific context of London: what does the term actually mean, how has it been applied and is it being applied? Historical overviews of large-scale interventions from the past are combined with case studies of new and planned schemes, and explorations of how change and rejuvenation can retain or enhance the city’s unique sense of place and identity. Looking beyond the Games, the title will look at the direction in which regeneration is going in a post-recession economy. How can a long-established, highly protected and even cherished city, like London, continue to renew and expand? Unlike Chinese or Middle Eastern cities, London is constrained by a wide range of factors from heritage protection and geography to finance and democratic accountability; yet the city continues to grow, change and develop, either incrementally or through big, dramatic leaps, like the Olympic Park and King’s Cross. In this way, London provides a fascinating case study of how a developed, Western city can negotiate and greet the pressures for change. Contributors: Michael Batty, Peter Bishop, Matthew Carmona, Murray Fraser, Matthew Gandy, Robert Harbison, Peter Murray and Austin Williams Architects: Sir Terry Farrell, Richard McCormac Projects: King’s Cross, the London 2012 Games and the Shard

The Efficacy of Architecture

The Efficacy of Architecture
Author: Tahl Kaminer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 219
Release: 2016-12-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317437446

A significant ideological transition has taken place in the discipline of architecture in the last few years. Originating in a displeasure with the ‘starchitecture’ system and the focus on aesthetic innovation, a growing number of architects, emboldened by the 2007–8 economic crisis, have staged a rebellion against the dominant mode of architectural production. Against a ‘disinterested’ position emulating high art, they have advocated political engagement, citizen participation and the right to the city. Against the fascination with the rarefied architectural object, they have promoted an interest in everyday life, play, self-build and personalization. At the centre of this rebellion is the call for architecture to (re-)assume its social and political role in society. The Efficacy of Architecture supports the return of architecture to politics by interrogating theories, practices and instances that claim or evidence architectural agency. It studies the political theories animating the architects, revisits the emergence of reformist architecture in the late nineteenth century, and brings to the fore the relation of spatial organization to social forms. In the process, a clearer picture emerges of the agency of architecture, of the threats to as well as potentials for meaningful societal transformation through architectural design.