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Porous City
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 304

Porous City

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2018-03-19
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  • Publisher: Birkhäuser

Some time ago, Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis used the term "porosity" with reference to Naples’ urban characteristics – spaces merging into each other and providing the backdrop for the unforeseen – improvisation as a way of life. Today, the term "porosity" in this context is increasingly used conceptually. Well-known authors from the worlds of architecture, town planning, and landscape design embark on a search for new concepts for a life-enhancing, user-friendly city – with reference to this enigmatic term. The term refers to the overlaying and interweaving of spaces and structures, to urban textures and their architectural properties and qualities – to cities with radically mixed urban functions.

The vulnerable middle class?
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 146

The vulnerable middle class?

This volume addresses the question of how the rapidly rising cost of living in prospering cities affects the everyday life and life plans of the middle class. Particularly the depths of focus of a cultural anthropological, ethnographic view of the lived everyday life of people thus facilitates insight and understanding which is missing in certain macro perspectives in the economics and social sciences. Therefore, in the following contributions which are based on examples from Germany and Sweden, colleagues will discuss the question of how members of the middle class deal with residing and living in today’s postmodern cities, which tactics they develop and which strategies become apparent before the background of the processes sketched above. The seven papers originate from the panel “The vulnerable Middle Class? Strategies of housing in a prospering city” which was organized by the two editors at the 13th congress of the Societé Internationale d’Ethnologie et de Folklore 2017 in Göttingen, titled “Ways of Dwelling. Crisis – Craft – Creativity“.

The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 357

The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2018-06-27
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  • Publisher: Springer

Who shapes our cities? In an age of increasing urban pluralism, globalization and immigration, decreasing public budgets, and an ongoing crisis of authority among designers and planners, the urban environment is shaped by a number of non-traditional stakeholders. The book surveys the kaleidoscope of views on the agency of urbanism, providing an overview of the various scholarly debates and territories that pertain to bottom-up efforts such as everyday urbanism, DIY urbanism, guerilla urbanism, tactical urbanism, and lean urbanism. Uniquely, this books seeks connections between the various movements by curating a range of views on the past, present, and future of bottom-up urbanism. The contributors also connect the recent trend of bottom-up efforts in the West with urban informality in the Global South, drawing parallels and finding contrast between social and institutional structures across the globe. The book appeals to urbanists in the widest sense of the word: those who shape, study, and improve our urban spaces.

Spaces of Uncertainty - Berlin revisited
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 160

Spaces of Uncertainty - Berlin revisited

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2018-03-05
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  • Publisher: Birkhäuser

How has Berlin’s urban landscape changed in its remarkable transformation from divided city to creative capital? Despite the monumental heritage and grand development projects, Berlin still conjures up images of urban fragmentation and vacant inner-city land. The book reveals the changing nature and complex politics of this open space. A rephotographing of sites between 2001 and 2016 shows how no man’s land has made way for new apartments and underground hangouts have changed into commercial hubs, but it also transports us to remaining pockets of urban wilderness and unexpected freedom right next to the city’s most iconic squares. The accompanying essays by noted urban thinkers explore this little-known but vital reserve—forcing us to reflect on our unrelenting efforts to chart the future of the city at large.

Security, Law and Borders
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 154

Security, Law and Borders

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2010-09-21
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  • Publisher: Routledge

This book focuses on security practices, civil liberties and the politics of borders in liberal democracies. In the aftermath of 9/11, security practices and the denial of human rights and civil liberties are often portrayed as an exception to liberal rule, and seen as institutionally, legally and spatially distinct from the liberal state. Drawing upon detailed empirical studies from migration controls, such as the French waiting zone, Australian off-shore processing and US maritime interceptions, this study demonstrates that the limitation of liberties is not an anomaly of liberal rule, but embedded within the legal order of liberal democracies. The most ordinary, yet powerful way, of limit...

The Museum
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 212

The Museum

This book is the first part of a three-volume field guide to the future of architecture. The collection maps contemporary architectural practice and urban planning, presented through the words and ideas of some of its key players and change-makers. From institutions, activists, thinkers, curators and architects to urban bloggers, polemicists, critics and publishers, Archifutures presents the people shaping tomorrow’s architecture and cities – and thereby helping to shape our societies of the future as well. This first volume of Archifutures, The Museum includes thought pieces, essays, interviews, and discussions – in both words and pictures – between members of Future Architecture platform. Steering the dialogue on the contemporary role of these institutional bodies are current practitioners and thinkersin the architecture and design field. Designed by Diana Portela with Janar Siniloo and Lena Giovanazzi.

Speculation
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 242

Speculation

  • Categories: Art
  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2023-06-06
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  • Publisher: MIT Press

A wide-ranging investigation of what speculation is, and what is at stake for artistic, curatorial, critical, and institutional practices in relating to their own speculative character. Engaging with the question of speculation in ways that encompass the artistic, the economic, and the philosophical, with excursions into the literary and the scientific, this collection approaches the theme as a powerful logic of contemporary life whose key instantiations are art and finance. Both are premised on the power of contingency, temporality, and experimentation in the creation (and capitalization) of possible worlds. Artistic autonomy, and the self-legislation of the space of art, have often been se...

Agency
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 192

Agency

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2009-12-04
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  • Publisher: Routledge

Presenting current thinking from practitioners and scholars from around the world, this book asks for a more active relationship between the humanities, the architectural profession, and society. Considering issues of agency, in particular the role of architectural research as an agency of transformation, the chapters here explore how humanities research can better contribute towards understanding current architectural needs, possibilities and capacities for action.

Terror and the Postcolonial
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 408

Terror and the Postcolonial

Terror and the Postcolonial is a major comparative study of terrorism and its representations in postcolonial theory, literature, and culture. A ground-breaking study addressing and theorizing the relationship between postcolonial studies, colonial history, and terrorism through a series of contemporary and historical case studies from various postcolonial contexts Critically analyzes the figuration of terrorism in a variety of postcolonial literary texts from South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East Raises the subject of terror as both an expression of globalization and a postcolonial product Features key essays by well-known theorists, such as Robert J. C. Young, Derek Gregory, and Achille Mbembe, and Vron Ware

The Re-Use of Urban Ruins
  • Language: en
  • Pages: 251

The Re-Use of Urban Ruins

  • Type: Book
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  • Published: 2014-12-05
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  • Publisher: Routledge

How do urban ruins provoke their cultural revaluation? This book offers a unique sociological analysis about the social agencies of material culture and atmospheric knowledge of buildings in the making. It draws on ethnographic research in Berlin along the former Palace of the Republic, the E-Werk and the Café Moskau in order to make visible an interdisciplinary regime of design experts who have developed a professional sensorium turning the built memory of the city into an object of aesthetic inquiry.