Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between

Urban Interstices: The Aesthetics and the Politics of the In-between
Author: Andrea Mubi Brighenti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2016-02-11
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317003721

Bringing together a team of international scholars with an interest in urban transformations, spatial justice and territoriality, this volume questions how the interstice is related to the emerging processes of partitioning, enclave-making and zoning, showing how in-between spaces are intimately related to larger flows, networks, territories and boundaries. Illustrated with a range of case studies from places such as the US, Quebec, the UK, Italy, Gaza, Iraq, India, and South-east Asia, the volume analyses the place and function of interstitial locales in both a ’disciplined’ urban space and a disordered space conceptualized through the notions of ’excess’, ’danger’ and ’threat’. Warning not to romanticize the interstice, the book invites us to study it as not simply a place but also a set of phenomena, events and social interactions. How are interstices perceived and represented? What is the politics of visibility that is applied to them? How to capture their peculiar rhythms, speeds and affects? On the one hand, interstices open up venues for informality, improvisation, challenge, and bricolage, playful as well as angry statements on the neoliberal city and enhanced urban inequalities. On the other hand, they also represent a crucial site of governance (even governance by withdrawal) and urban management, where an array of techniques ranging from military urbanism to new forms of value extraction are experimented. At the point of convergence of all these tensions, interstices appear as veritable sites of transformation, where social forces clash and mesh prefiguring our urban future. The book interrogates these territories, proposing new ways to explore the dynamics, events and visibilities that define them.

Urban Interstices

Urban Interstices
Author: Andrea Mubi Brighenti
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2016-11-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9781138257399

Bringing together a team of international scholars with an interest in urban transformations, spatial justice and territoriality, this volume questions how the interstice is related to the emerging processes of partitioning, enclave-making and zoning, showing how in-between spaces are intimately related to larger flows, networks, territories and boundaries. Illustrated with a range of case studies from places such as the US, Quebec, the UK, Italy, Gaza, Iraq, India, and South-east Asia, the volume analyses the place and function of interstitial locales in both a 'disciplined' urban space and a disordered space conceptualized through the notions of 'excess', 'danger' and 'threat'. Warning not to romanticize the interstice, the book invites us to study it as not simply a place but also a set of phenomena, events and social interactions. How are interstices perceived and represented? What is the politics of visibility that is applied to them? How to capture their peculiar rhythms, speeds and affects? On the one hand, interstices open up venues for informality, improvisation, challenge, and bricolage, playful as well as angry statements on the neoliberal city and enhanced urban inequalities. On the other hand, they also represent a crucial site of governance (even governance by withdrawal) and urban management, where an array of techniques ranging from military urbanism to new forms of value extraction are experimented. At the point of convergence of all these tensions, interstices appear as veritable sites of transformation, where social forces clash and mesh prefiguring our urban future. The book interrogates these territories, proposing new ways to explore the dynamics, events and visibilities that define them.

The Interstitial Spaces of Urban Sprawl

The Interstitial Spaces of Urban Sprawl
Author: Cristian A. Silva
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2022-01-25
Genre: Science
ISBN: 100051806X

This book proposes the idea of interstitial space as a theoretical framework to describe and understand the implications of in-between lands in urban studies and their profound transformative effects in cities and their urban character. The analysis of the interstitial spaces is structured into four themes: the conceptual grounds of interstitial spaces; the nature of interstices; the geographical scale of interstices; and the relationality of interstices. The empirical section of the book introduces seven cases that illustrate the varied nature of interstitiality to finally discuss its implications in the broader field of urban studies. Reflections upon further lines of enquiry and theories of urbanisation, urban sprawl, and cities are highlighted in the conclusion chapter. This is the ideal text for scholars of urban planning, strategic spatial planning, landscape planning, urban design, architecture, and other cognate disciplines as well as advanced students in these fields.

The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces

The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces
Author: Jens Kaae Fisker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-10-26
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351596640

Alternative urban spaces across civic, private, and public spheres emerge in response to the great challenges that urban actors are currently confronted with. Labour markets are changing rapidly, the availability of affordable housing is under intensifying pressure, and public spaces have become battlegrounds of urban politics. This edited collection brings together contributors in order to spark an international dialogue about the production of alternative urban spaces through a threefold exploration of alternative spaces of work, dwelling, and public life. Seeking out and examining existing alternative urban spaces, the authors identify the elements that provide opportunities to create radically different futures for the world’s urban spaces. This volume is the culmination of an international search for alternative practices to dominant modes of capitalist urbanisation, bringing together interdisciplinary, empirically grounded chapters from hot spots in disparate cities around the world. Offering a multidisciplinary perspective, The Production of Alternative Urban Spaces will be of great interest to academics working across the fields of urban sociology, human geography, anthropology, political science, and urban planning. It will also be indispensable to any postgraduate students engaged in urban and regional studies.

The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968

The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968
Author: Isabelle Doucet
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2016-07-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1315308738

What makes a city? What makes architecture? And, what is to be included in the discussions of architecture and the city? Attempting to answer such ambitious questions, this book starts from a city’s specificity and complexity. In response to recent debates in architectural theory around the agency and locus of critical action, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. Rather than through conceptual and ideological categorisations, it studies how architecture and criticality work within specific circumstances. Brussels, a complex city with a turbulent architectural and urban past, forms a compelling case for examining the tensions between urban politics, architectural imaginations, society’s needs and desires, and the city’s history and fabric. Inspired by pragmatist-relational philosophies, this book tests the potential of criticality through-practice. It studies a series of critical actions and tools, which occurred in Brussels’ architectural and urban culture after 1968. Weaved together, Brussels architectural production emerges from a variety of actors, including architects, urban policy makers, activists, social workers, and citizens, but also architectural movements and ideologies, urban renewal programs, urban traumas, plans and projects, and mundane everyday practices and constructions. This book contributes to the study of Brussels and offers a timely contribution to recent scholarship on the critical reappraisal of architectural debates from the 1960s through to the 1990s. In addition, by showing how pragmatist-relational philosophies can be made relevant for architectural theory, the book opens hopeful potentials for how architectural theory can better contribute to the formulation of a critical agenda for architecture.

Space Oddities

Space Oddities
Author: Stefan L. Brandt
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2018
Genre: History
ISBN: 3643507976

"Space Oddities: Difference and Identity in the American City" approaches a space (and place) central to the American imagination-the city. In particular, this volume discusses the paradoxes of American cities and American urban life. In this way, the book critically engages with the paradoxes of the American identity, embodied by cultural practices in, and cultural representations of, urban life in the United States. (Series: American Studies in Austria, Vol. 16) [Subject: Sociology, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Urban Studies]

Reinventing the Local in Tourism

Reinventing the Local in Tourism
Author: Antonio Paolo Russo
Publisher: Channel View Publications
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2016-05-03
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 184541571X

This book investigates the way localities are shaped and negotiated through tourism, and explores the emerging success of local peer-produced hospitality and tourism services which are transforming the tourist experience. Tourists are now being brought into much closer contact with locals and have new opportunities to experience the community at their destination. This book examines these place experiences and travel-sharing arrangements that have now spread globally due to the use of social communication platforms such as Airbnb. It analyses the existence of global communities of ‘place experts’ that are redefining the organisational structures, value systems, market opportunities, affordabilities and geographies in travel and tourism. This volume brings together the work of established tourism scholars as well as early career researchers and is one of the first books to examine the global-local relationship at tourism destinations and the way that the rapidly developing field of peer-to-peer tourism is transforming tourist destinations.

Protest, Property and the Commons

Protest, Property and the Commons
Author: Lucy Finchett-Maddock
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2016-03-17
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1136004645

Protest, Property and the Commons focuses on the alternative property narratives of ‘social centres’, or political squats, and how the spaces and their communities create their own – resistant – form of law. Drawing on critical legal theory, legal pluralism, legal geography, poststructuralism and new materialism, the book considers how protest movements both use state law and create new, more informal, legalities in order to forge a practice of resistance. Invaluable for anyone working within the area of informal property in land, commons, protest and adverse possession, this book offers a ground-breaking account of the integral role of time, space and performance in the instituting processes of law and resistance.

Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome

Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome
Author: Margherita Grazioli
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2021-04-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 3030708497

This book tells the story of Metropoliz, a vacant salami factory located in the Eastern periphery of Rome (Italy) that was squatted in 2009 by homeless households with the cooperation of the Housing Rights Movement Blocchi Precari Metropolitani, and progressively reconverted into the house and museum spaces that form the Città Meticcia (the mestizo city). Through a vivid activist-ethnographic account, Margherita Grazioli suggests that Metropoliz exemplifies a practice of grassroots urban regeneration that speaks to the conflicted reconfiguration of real estate urban regimes in a post-crisis, post-neoliberal scenario. Using the contentious reappropriation of housing as a point of departure for claiming manifold rights, Metropoliz represents an alternative model of urbanity and habitation that will inspire contemporary urban social movements concerned with the demand of the ‘right to the city’, as well as those concerned with the ontology of the urban commons.

Freedom without Permission

Freedom without Permission
Author: Frances S. Hasso
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2016-09-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822373726

As the 2011 uprisings in North Africa reverberated across the Middle East, a diverse cross section of women and girls publicly disputed gender and sexual norms in novel, unauthorized, and often shocking ways. In a series of case studies ranging from Tunisia's 14 January Revolution to the Taksim Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, the contributors to Freedom without Permission reveal the centrality of the intersections between body, gender, sexuality, and space to these groundbreaking events. Essays include discussions of the blogs written by young women in Egypt, the Women2Drive campaign in Saudi Arabia, the reintegration of women into the public sphere in Yemen, the sexualization of female protesters encamped at Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout, and the embodied, performative, and artistic spaces of Morocco's 20 February Movement. Conceiving of revolution as affective, embodied, spatialized, and aesthetic forms of upheaval and transgression, the contributors show how women activists imagined, inhabited, and deployed new spatial arrangements that undermined the public-private divisions of spaces, bodies, and social relations, continuously transforming them through symbolic and embodied transgressions. Contributors. Lamia Benyoussef, Susanne Dahlgren, Karina Eileraas, Susana Galan, Banu Gökariksel, Frances S. Hasso, Sonali Pahwa, Zakia Salime