Urban Labyrinths

Urban Labyrinths
Author: Pablo Meninato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 236
Release: 2024-03-29
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003847250

Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines.

Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution

Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution
Author: Ian Campbell
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 253
Release: 2013-02-14
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004246304

Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution traces the development of the postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan novel. Its close readings of major texts are based in the spatial practices of these novels.

Literature & Place, 1800-2000

Literature & Place, 1800-2000
Author: Peter Brown
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2008
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 9783039115709

Ten original essays examine the transactions between real places and the literary imagination, including the reinvention of real places in literary form, from 1800 to the present day. They deal with different kinds of locations (islands, countries, cities), the topoi writers use to articulate a sense of place (maps, ruins, landscape, history), their generic manifestations in fiction, travel writing, topography, (auto)biography and poetry, and the theoretical and methodological issues which arise. The focus moves outwards from local to regional and national issues, covering questions of cultural identity, space, representation, historicity, and modernity in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, the United States, and the South Pacific. The contributors are drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, and include established scholars as well as newer voices.

Urban Labyrinths

Urban Labyrinths
Author: Rupert Moore
Publisher: Independently Published
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2023-08-05
Genre:
ISBN:

Embark on an exhilarating journey through the heart of our cities with our Special Report: "Urban Labyrinths: Twists and Turns Amongst City Streets." Discover the riveting story of urban development, from historical beginnings to future prospects. This enlightening guide takes you on a tour through the intricate networks that constitute our bustling metropolises. Learn about the principles underpinning city planning and the dynamic evolution of street design. Immerse yourself in the social narratives and architectural wonders that give character to our cityscapes. Delve into the world of green oases within the urban labyrinths and uncover the secrets of subterranean networks. Experience the multifaceted culture and vibrant community life at the core of these cityscapes. Look forward into the future of urban labyrinths and the innovative city concepts on the horizon. Written by Rupert Moore, a devoted urban explorer and gifted writer, this report offers both seasoned city-dwellers and curious newcomers an engaging and comprehensive view on the magic sealed within our urban environments. Award yourself with the adventure of a lifetime - grab your copy of "Urban Labyrinths: Twists and Turns Amongst City Streets" today and let your urban exploration begin!

City Images

City Images
Author: Mary Ann Caws
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2013-11-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1134296053

First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.

The Situationist City

The Situationist City
Author: Simon Sadler
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1999-08-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780262692250

Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the Situationist International left behind. From 1957 to 1972 the artistic and political movement known as the Situationist International (SI) worked aggressively to subvert the conservative ideology of the Western world. The movement's broadside attack on "establishment" institutions and values left its mark upon the libertarian left, the counterculture, the revolutionary events of 1968, and more recent phenomena from punk to postmodernism. But over time it tended to obscure Situationism's own founding principles. In this book, Simon Sadler investigates the artistic, architectural, and cultural theories that were once the foundations of Situationist thought, particularly as they applied to the form of the modern city. According to the Situationists, the benign professionalism of architecture and design had led to a sterilization of the world that threatened to wipe out any sense of spontaneity or playfulness. The Situationists hankered after the "pioneer spirit" of the modernist period, when new ideas, such as those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, still felt fresh and vital. By the late fifties, movements such as British and American Pop Art and French Nouveau Ralisme had become intensely interested in everyday life, space, and mass culture. The SI aimed to convert this interest into a revolution—at the level of the city itself. Their principle for the reorganization of cities was simple and seductive: let the citizens themselves decide what spaces and architecture they want to live in and how they wish to live in them. This would instantly undermine the powers of state, bureaucracy, capital, and imperialism, thereby revolutionizing people's everyday lives. Simon Sadler searches for the Situationist City among the detritus of tracts, manifestos, and works of art that the SI left behind. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "The Naked City," outlines the Situationist critique of the urban environment as it then existed. The second, "Formulary for a New Urbanism," examines Situationist principles for the city and for city living. The third, "A New Babylon," describes actual designs proposed for a Situationist City.

Melville's Evermoving Dawn

Melville's Evermoving Dawn
Author: John Bryant
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 452
Release: 1997
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780873385626

This collection of analytical essays is the result of several conferences throughout 1991, the centennary of Herman Melville's death. They survey the past and present of Melville Studies and suggest directions for the future.

Re-imaging the City

Re-imaging the City
Author: Somaiyeh Falahat
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2013-12-09
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 3658045965

Somaiyeh Falahat investigates the spatial and morphological logic of pre-modern Middle Eastern and North African cities, so-called “Islamic cities”. She bases her argument on the fact that the city and consequently its form and structure, similar to other human products, have deep roots in the thought-structure of the people. Thus, to know such places properly, one has to refer to this life-world and use it as a structure to observe the city. This approach aims at opening new levels of understanding of the city by grasping indigenous concepts and structures; it puts forward claims for the possibility of a new method of analysis. The author studies the historic city of Isfahan as the case study and suggests that an indigenous term, Hezar-Too, can explain the complexity of the city, which has been interpreted as labyrinthine and maze-like accounting for the essence of the city and its form in an appropriate way. Looking at the city from this new point of view can help in observing it in its context and subsequently in discovering its real character.

Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge

Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge
Author: Antoine Dechêne
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2018-08-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 331994469X

This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs – the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text – that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.

Melville's City

Melville's City
Author: Wyn Kelley
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 1996-07-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521560542

She shows that images both from Melville and from popular sources of the time represented New York variously as Capital, Labyrinth, City of Man, and City of God, and she goes on to demonstrate that he resisted a generalizing or totalizing representation of the city by revealing its hybrid identity and giving voice to the poor, the displaced, and the racially excluded.