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The Ludic City
This international and illustrated work challenges current writings focussing on the problems of urban public space to present a more nuanced and dialectical conception of urban life. Detailed and extensive international urban case studies show how urban open spaces are used for play, which is defined and discussed using Caillois' four-part definition – competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. Stevens explores and analyzes these case studies according to locations where play has been observed: paths, intersections, thresholds, boundaries and props. Applicable to a wide-range of countries and city forms, The Ludic City is a fascinating and stimulating read for all who are involved or interested in the design of urban spaces.
Loose Space
In cities around the world people use a variety of public spaces to relax, to protest, to buy and sell, to experiment and to celebrate. Loose Space explores the many ways that urban residents, with creativity and determination, appropriate public space to meet their own needs and desires. Familiar or unexpected, spontaneous or planned, momentary or long-lasting, the activities that make urban space loose continue to give cities life and vitality. The book examines physical spaces and how people use them. Contributors discuss a wide range of recreational, commercial and political activities; some are conventional, others are more experimental. Some of the activities occur alongside the intend...
Memorials as Spaces of Engagement
Memorials are more diverse in design and subject matter than ever before. No longer limited to statues of heroes placed high on pedestals, contemporary memorials engage visitors in new, often surprising ways, contributing to the liveliness of public space. In Memorials as Spaces of Engagement Quentin Stevens and Karen A. Franck explore how changes in memorial design and use have helped forge closer, richer relationships between commemorative sites and their visitors. The authors combine first hand analysis of key examples with material drawn from existing scholarship. Examples from the US, Canada, Australia and Europe include official, formally designed memorials and informal ones, those cre...
Public Space Design and Social Cohesion
Social cohesion is often perceived as being under threat from the increasing cultural and economic differences in contemporary cities and the increasing intensity of urban life. Public space, in its role as the main stage for social interactions between strangers, clearly plays a role in facilitating or limiting opportunities for social cohesion. But what exactly is social cohesion, how is it experienced in the public realm, and what role can the design of city spaces have in supporting or promoting it? There are significant knowledge gaps between the social sciences and design disciplines and between academia and practice, and thus a dispersed knowledge base that currently lacks nuanced ins...
Cultural Controversies in the West German Public Sphere
This book develops a theory of aesthetic fiction’s impact on social identities. Throughout five case studies, the author develops the argument that social identities are nurtured by and may even emerge through the conflict between different aesthetic expressions. As it creates affective structures, narrative fiction enables the development and formation of political and cultural identities. This work is part of a field of research that deals with the aesthetics of the everyday and the idea of social aesthetics. It argues for a central role for the arts in the creation and formation of modern society. Social identities emerge in response to aesthetic-sensual patterns of perception. Focusing on five West German public debates in the years 1950 to 1990, this work sheds light upon the transformation of social reality through the discursive adaption of art.
Mobilizing Hospitality
The concept of ’mobility’ has sparked lively academic debate in recent years. Drawing on research from the fields of anthropology, geography, sociology and tourism studies, this volume examines the intersection between mobility and hospitality, highlighting the issues that emerge as we encounter strangers in a mobile world. Through a series of diverse empirical accounts, it focuses on the transnational movement of people in the contexts of migration and tourism and examines how hospitality serves as a way of promoting and policing encounters, questioning how these relations are marked by exclusion as well as inclusion, and by violence as well as by kindness. In addition to exploring the power relations between mobile populations (hosts and guests) and attitudes (hospitality and hostility), the book also examines spaces of hospitality and mobility, such as cities, hotels, clubs, cafes, spas, asylums, restaurants, homes and homepages. In doing so, it makes a significant contribution to the political and ethical dimensions of mobile social relations.
Road Scars
Despite the ubiquity of automobility, the reality of automotive death is hidden from everyday view. There are accident blackspots all over the roads that we use and go past every day but the people that have died there or been injured are not marked, unless by homemade shrines and personal memorialization. Nowhere on the planet is this practice as densely actioned as in the United States. Road Scars is a highly visual scholarly monograph about how roadside car crash shrines place the collective trauma of living in a car culture in the everyday landscapes of automobility. Roadside shrines—or road trauma shrines—are vernacular memorial assemblages built by private individuals at sites wher...
The Ballerina and the Bull
Our moment has seen the resurgence of an anarchist sensibility, from the uprisings in Seattle in 1999 to the Occupy movement of 2011. Against the vacuity and drift of financialized capitalism, proclaiming "There is no Alternative," these insurgent movements have insisted that an alternative is possible. In The Ballerina and the Bull Johanna Isaacson explores the occult history of US punk, hardcore, queercore, and riot grrrl, DIY culture, and alternative subcultures to trace a new politics of "expressive negation" that both contests the present order and gives us a sense of the impasses of politics in an age of depoliticization. "Expressive negation" registers the contradictory politics at the heart of these projects: the desire for negation that must be positively expressed. Drawing on first-hand experience, interviews, and discussion of the ludic, spatial, and sexual politics of anarchist subcultures, Isaacson maps an underground utopian politics of style and develops a radically new history of the present moment.
Urbanization and Contemporary Chinese Art
This book explores the relationship between the ongoing urbanization in China and the production of contemporary Chinese art since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Wang provides a detailed analysis of artworks and methodologies of art-making from eight contemporary artists who employ a wide range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, installation, video, and performance. She also sheds light on the relationship between these artists and their sociocultural origins, investigating their provocative responses to various processes and problems brought about by Chinese urbanization. With this urbanization comes a fundamental shift of the philosophical and aesthetic foundations in the practice of Chinese art: from a strong affiliation with nature and countryside to one that is complexly associated with the city and the urban world.
