Spatial Orders, Social Forms

Spatial Orders, Social Forms
Author: Adrian Anagnost
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2022
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0300254016

A fascinating look at modernist urban planning and spatial theories in Brazilian 20th-century art and architecture Exploring the intersections among art, architecture, and urbanism in Brazil from the 1920s through the 1960s, Adrian Anagnost shows how modernity was manifested in locally specific spatial forms linked to Brazil's colonial and imperial past. Discussing the ways artists and architects understood urban planning as a tool to reorganize the world, control human action, and remedy social problems, Anagnost offers a nuanced account of the seeming conflict between modernist aesthetics and a predominately poor and historically disenfranchised urban public, with particular attention to regionalist forms of urban development. Organized as a series of case studies of projects such as Flávio de Carvalho's performative urbanism, the construction of the Ministry of Education and Public Health building, Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi's efforts to modernize Brazilian museums, and Hélio Oiticica's interstitial works, this study is full of groundbreaking insights into the ways that modernist theories of urbanism shaped the art and architecture of 20th-century Brazil.

The Order of Forms

The Order of Forms
Author: Anna Kornbluh
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2019-11-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 022665334X

In literary studies today, debates about the purpose of literary criticism and about the place of formalism within it continue to simmer across periods and approaches. Anna Kornbluh contributes to—and substantially shifts—that conversation in The Order of Forms by offering an exciting new category, political formalism, which she articulates through the co-emergence of aesthetic and mathematical formalisms in the nineteenth century. Within this framework, criticism can be understood as more affirmative and constructive, articulating commitments to aesthetic expression and social collectivity. Kornbluh offers a powerful argument that political formalism, by valuing forms of sociability like the city and the state in and of themselves, provides a better understanding of literary form and its political possibilities than approaches that view form as a constraint. To make this argument, she takes up the case of literary realism, showing how novels by Dickens, Brontë, Hardy, and Carroll engage mathematical formalism as part of their political imagining. Realism, she shows, is best understood as an exercise in social modeling—more like formalist mathematics than social documentation. By modeling society, the realist novel focuses on what it considers the most elementary features of social relations and generates unique political insights. Proposing both this new theory of realism and the idea of political formalism, this inspired, eye-opening book will have far-reaching implications in literary studies.

Order and Disorder in Urban Space and Form

Order and Disorder in Urban Space and Form
Author: Paul Jenkins
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2023-09-20
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317599608

The global application of Enlightenment-derived concepts to create social order through urban form suggests that we believe we know how to create a (future) ordered environment. But these notions of order and disorder need interrogation, especially as the world rapidly urbanises. Not only have such approaches failed to produce more social order, but it has become clear that the imposition of these ideas in cities of the South cuts across alternative systems of social and cultural order and creates new disorder. Thus, if we are serious about forms of urban order, then it is time to rethink what we mean by order in the fi rst place. As this provocative and timely book shows, what we think of as urban order is partial and restricted, and what we perceive as disorder usually masks underlying orders of social nature. The book is intended for architects, urban designers, planners and urban scholars, as well as urban policymakers, managers and residents, to consider a different approach to emerging urban space and form, starting from an understanding of the cultural imaginaries and social constructs that underpin the production of most urban fabric and engaging with these concepts and organisational forms to improve urban life for the majority.

Space, the City and Social Theory

Space, the City and Social Theory
Author: Fran Tonkiss
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2005
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780745628264

Space, the City and Social Theory offers a clear and critical account of key approaches to cities and urban space within social theory and analysis. It explores the relation of the social and the spatial in the context of critical urban themes: community and anonymity; social difference and spatial divisions; politics and public space; gentrification and urban renewal; gender and sexuality; subjectivity and space; experience and everyday practice in the city. The text adopts an international and interdisciplinary approach, drawing on a range of debates on cities and urban life. It brings together classic perspectives in urban sociology and social theory with the analysis of contemporary urban problems and issues. Rather than viewing the urban simply as a backdrop for more general social processes, the discussion looks at how social and spatial relations shape different versions of the city: as a place of social interaction and of solitude; as a site of difference and segregation; as a space of politics and power; as a landscape of economic and cultural distinction; as a realm of everyday experience and freedom. Similarly, it examines how core social categories - such as class, culture, gender, sexuality and community - are shaped and reproduced in urban contexts. Linking debates in urban studies to wider concerns within social theory and analysis, this accessible text will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students in urban sociology, social and cultural geography, urban and cultural studies.

Globalizing Cities

Globalizing Cities
Author: Peter Marcuse
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2011-07-18
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1444399616

This exciting collection of original essays provides students and professionals with an international and comparative examination of changes in global cities, revealing a growing pattern of social and spatial division or polarization.

Architecture and Order

Architecture and Order
Author: Michael Parker Pearson
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2003-09-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1134728107

Architecture is a powerful medium for representing, ordering and classifying the world, and understanding the use of space is fundamental to archaeological inquiry. Architecture and Order draws on the work of archaeologists, social theorists and architects to explore the way in which people relate to the architecture which surrounds them. In many societies, houses and tombs have encoded cultural meanings and values which are invoked and recalled through the practices of daily life. Chapters include explorations of the early farming r archi*eye of Europe, from before the use of metals, to the Classical and Medieval worlds of the Mediterranean and Europe. Research of the recent past and present include an overview of hunter-gatherers' camp organization, a reassessment of the use of space amongst the Dogon of West Africa and an examination of mental disorders relating to the use of space in Britain. The volume goes beyond the implication that culture determines form to develop an approach that integrates meaning and practice.

Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms

Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms
Author: Georg Simmel
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 714
Release: 2009-02-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 9047426681

Georg Simmel's highly original take on the newly revived field of sociology succeeded in making the field far more sophisticated than it had been beforehand. He took insights from dialectical thought and Kantian epistemology to develop a "form sociology" method that remains implicit in the field a century later. Forms include such patterns of interaction as inequality, secrecy, membership in multiple groups, organization size, and coalition formation. While today texts and professional societies are organized around "contents" rather than "forms," a fresh reading of Simmel's chapters on forms suggests original avenues of inquiry into each of the contents--family, business, religion, politics, labor relations, leisure.

New Mobilities Regimes in Art and Social Sciences

New Mobilities Regimes in Art and Social Sciences
Author: Susanne Witzgall
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 421
Release: 2016-04-29
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317088336

New Mobilities Regimes analyses how global mobilities are changing the world of today and the role of political and economic power. Bringing together essays by leading scholars and social scientists, including Mimi Sheller and Bülent Diken with the work of well-known artists and art theorists such as Jordan Crandall, Ursula Bieman, Gülsün Karamustafa and Dan Perjovschi this book is a unique document of the cross-disciplinary mobility and power discourse. The specific design, integrating the text and art elements to create a singular dialogue makes for an exciting intellectual and aesthetic experience. Illustrated by a range of studies which examine the regulation and structure of mobility, such as the daily routines of teleworkers, Ukrainian cleaners in Western Europe, the mobility policies of global corporations, and the impact of bicycle policies on public space, New Mobilities Regimes emphasizes the routes and crossroads of migration flows as well as at the interaction of mobility and new spatial concepts. The contributors are concerned with both the positive outcomes and the disappointments of the global mobilizations in modern lives. This book is ground-breaking in that it calls for the reassessment of the figurative arts in providing independent and insightful knowledge-generating research on the nature of mobility and highlights the new appreciation of visual representations in sociology, cultural geography and anthropology.

Georg Simmel

Georg Simmel
Author: David Frisby
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 1994
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780415060714

This collection brings together the essential secondary literature on Simmel. Selected and edited by David Frisby - a scholar who has perhaps done more than anyone to rehabilitate Simmel's reputation. Both a consise and comprehensive work.