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Ireland is now an urban society, and both parts of the island have experienced rapid urban-generated growth and new patterns of development in recent years. This inter-disciplinary book adopts an all-Ireland perspective to investigate the tension that exists between sustainable urban development values and rhetoric - such as increased densities, brown field development, the compact city and social inclusion - and the emerging geography of urban Ireland, influenced by consumer and lifestyle choices. The introduction provides an overview of the dynamics of urban change, particularly during the 1990s, and the experience of rapid economic growth. The following chapters are divided into two parts, considering sustainable urban environments, and sustainable communities. This book will appeal to students, academics, policy and decision-makers, given that it adopts both a qualitative and quantitative approach, and introduces a range of new empirical studies covering both physical and social sustainable development.
The Irish folklore of the Otherworld is rich in its many manifestations of supernatural beings and personages. This is represented in many different genres of folklore, such as folktales, legends, ballads, memorates, beliefs and belief statements, and exists within the context of rich literary, historical and imaginative parallels. This book presents a new reading of Irish religious belief and legend in a meaningful socio-historical context, examining popular belief and narratives of sinful women and unbaptised children, as a way of understanding a particular worldview in Irish society. Blending postmodern approaches with traditional methodologies, the author reviews the representation of women, sin and repentance in Irish folklore. The author suggests new ways of seeing this legend material, indicating strong links between the Irish and the French, specifically Breton, religious tradition, and tracing the nature of this inter-relationship through the post-Tridentine Counter Reformation Roman Catholic Church and its teachings. In this way aspects of Ireland's popular religious and cultural inheritance are examined.
The study of the cultural landscape has gained momentum in recent years, revealing new insights to geographers, archaeologists, sociologists and architects. The cultural landscape is often viewed as an emblematic site and thus a key player in the heritage process. This book explores the overlapping and often complex relationships between identity, memory, heritage and the cultural landscape. It provides an overview of new approaches in the study of these relationships, combined with evidence from Ireland, England, Scotland and the United States. These case studies demonstrate the significance of the past in the contemporary construction of identity narratives and draw attention to the powerful role of monuments and parades as sites of cultural heritage. The focus then shifts to the way in which heritage has become politicized for various ends, demonstrating the changing perception of particular heritage sites and buildings, and the role that this has played in constructing and reconstructing particular identities.
"This ambitious volume reviews the best recent work in historical geography... It demonstrates how a dual sense of history and geography is necessary to understand such key areas of contemporary debate as the inter-relationship between class, race and gender; the character of nations and nationalism; the nature and challenges of urban life; the legacies of colonialism; and the meaning and values attributed to places, landscapes and environments." - Mike Heffernan, University of Nottingham Key Concepts in Historical Geography forms part of an innovative set of companion texts for the Human Geography sub-disciplines. Organized around 24 short essays, it provides a cutting edge introduction to ...
The book is also relevant to the personal histories of many families in Northern Ireland. The inclusion of several individual stories within the text not only provides human interest, but also underlines the extent to which the story of commemoration is often a very personal one.".
"Collaboration and co-operation being keynotes of Anngret Simms's career, an impressive number of her colleagues and former students have joined together in a common enterprise to honour her contribution to academic life. The subject matter extends over the last two millennia and the authors range across the disciplines of archaeology, history and historical geography in particular. The contributors to this volume represent a substantial cross-section of the leading practitioners in their respective fields. The book contains over 130 figures and plates, along with tabulated material. Ireland's past, in all its diversity and richness, is here surveyed in a scholarly yet accessible way."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
How have Jews experienced their environments and how have they engaged with specific places? How do Jewish spaces emerge, how are they contested, performed and used? With these questions in mind, this anthology focuses on the production of Jewish space and “lived Jewish spaces” and sheds light on their diversity, inter-connectedness and multi-dimensionality. By exploring historical and contemporary case studies from around the world, the essays collected here shift the temporal focus generally applied to Jewish civilization to a spatially oriented perspective. The reader encounters sites such as the gardens cultivated in the Ghettos during World War II, the Israeli development town of Ne...
Genealogy has become a widely popular pursuit, as millions of people now research their family history, trace their forebears, attend family reunions and travel to ancestral home sites. Geographers have much to contribute to the serious study of the family history phenomenon. Land records, maps and even GIS are increasingly used by genealogical investigators. As a cultural practice, it encompasses peoples' emotional attachments to ancestral places and is widely manifest on the ground as personal heritage travel. Family history research also has significant potential to challenge accepted geographical views of migration, ethnicity, socio-economic class and place-based identities. This volume is possibly the first ever book to address the geographical and scholarly aspects of this increasingly popular social phenomenon. It highlights tools and information sources used by geographers and their application to family history research. Furthermore, it examines family history as a socio-cultural practice, including the activities of tourism, archival research and DNA testing.
This volume brings together an interdisciplinary team of leading scholars to discuss frameworks of value in relation to the preservation of historic environments. Starting from the premise that heritage values are culturally and historically constructed, the book examines the effects of pluralist frameworks of value on how preservation is conceived. It questions the social and economic consequences of constructions of value and how to balance a responsive, democratic conception of heritage with the pressure to deliver on social and economic objectives. It also describes the practicalities of managing the uncertainty and fluidity of the widely varying conceptions of heritage.
This innovative book interprets architectural spaces in the light of the underlying tensions between 18th-century Dublin as a fashionable resort and the attempts by the authorities to deal with some of the results of its apparent profligacy. These include the creation of new institutions as well as other measures designed to remove ugly realities from the street and purify urban space. Based mainly on 18th- and 19th-century archival material from the Rotunda Hospital, the Lock (venereal) Hospital and the Hospital for Incurables, this book challenges the vision of 18th-century Dublin as an ideal Protestant city by investigating the hidden world behind its wide streets and magnificent Georgian...