Writing Cities: Volume 1

Asian Social Science, 2013

Cities hold both the promise of economic opportunities and social mobility yet at the same time are hosts to massive poverty and social exclusion. The nation is confronting a host of problems associated with urbanisation common to the contemporary world, such as the impact of the auto mobile and mass transits, and the pressure of modernity on traditional society and community life. The impacts of our urbanites society coupled with the common issues of modern world certainly had impacted our society and cultural values that we have uphold for generations. This paper takes a critical look at issues plaguing urban life and argues that the perfect modern city living is only in a state of mind and our daily existence are already radically different from the urban images we carry in our minds and hearts. Our city has suffered from the dreary sea of uniformity, lacking in the diversity of orchestration of spaces to completely evoke a complex and dynamic public use. This paper identifies the factors which contribute to the phenomena and that have an impact on the makings of a liveable city. This paper reiterated that the challenge lies ahead of us to make changes and improvement to our cities for the loss of our great public life and public realm in city spaces. Urban public spaces when given prominence and focus can achieve monumentality and serve as a marker or gesture for the public to engage socially. Our city must invest its future in these spaces by creating all the opportunities and forms to respond to a dynamic public environment.

Rethinking the City: Reconfiguration and Fragmentation, 2024

Interdisciplinary in approach, this book employs the key concepts of fragmentation and reconfiguration to consider the ways in which human experience and artistic practice can engage with and respond to the disintegration that characterises modern cities. Asking how we might unsettle and decrypt the homogeneous images of cities created by processes linked to capitalism and globalisation, it invites us to consider the possibility of reimagining and rethinking the urban spaces we inhabit. An exploration of the complex relationship between aesthetics, the arts and the city, Rethinking the City: Reconfiguration and Fragmentation will appeal to scholars across various disciplines, including philosophy, urban sociology and geography, anthropology, political theory and visual and media studies.

Every now and again, the emperor must be disrobed. Disciplinary debates – shaped by the clothes of a thousand emperors past – become stale, and detached from the empiri- cal realities they purport to describe. Over the past two decades, AbdouMaliq Simone, among a number of poststructural scholars, has dutifully disrobed the field of urban studies, preparing the ground for a new vocabulary of urbanism that is better able to convey the dissonant realities of emerging city life in the Global South. Gone are the confident and well-worn concepts of ‘gentri- fication’, ‘entrepreneurship’, and ‘public space’. In their place stand an array of chal- lenging and often indeterminate notions, including those of ‘secretion’, ‘resonance’ and ‘re-description’, which reflect the unfold- ing paradoxes of urban life in the majority world.

Urban Studies, 2016

For some time now, the field of urban studies has been attempting to figure the urban whilst cognisant of the fact that the city exists as a highly problematic category of analysis. In this virtual special issue, we draw together some examples of what we call urban concepts under stress; concepts which appear to be reaching the limits of their capacity to render knowable a world characterised by the death of the city and the ascent of multi-scalar de-territorialisations and re-territorialisations. We organise the papers selected for inclusion into three bundles dealing respectively with complex urban systems, the hinterland problematic and governing cities in the age of flows. The phenomenon of urban concepts under stress stems from the existence of a gap between existing cartographies, visualisations and lexicons of the urban and 21st century spatial conditions and territorialities. Given that this disarticulation will surely increase as this century unfolds, a pressing question pr...

2000

The author analyzes the political geography of globally expanding urban informalities. These are conceptualized as 'gray spaces', positioned between the 'whiteness' of legality/approval/safety, and the 'blackness' of eviction/destruction/death. The vast expansion of gray spaces in contemporary cities reflects the emergence of new types of colonial relations, which are managed by urban regimes facilitating a process of 'creeping apartheid'. Planning is

Wiley-ISTE , 2019

Alternative Takes to the City presents the mosaic of relations and socio-spatial conditions which compose the plurality of contemporary everyday space(s) in cities, offering "a view from below". It proposes a multidisciplinary and gendered approach to the (relational) spatialities and temporalities of the everyday, of new mobilities and of global and local networks which constitute urban life in contemporary cities. The book raises an empirically informed theoretical proposition which springs from the multiplicity of everyday experiences, as a laboratory for understanding recent socio-spatial, political and ideological transformations. Each chapter takes forward the theoretical argument based on one or more examples of concrete cities, in order to unveil the complexity and diversity of the urban condition in changing conjunctures, in which local practices connect and collide with global developments.

The significance and appeal of this book lies in the fact that it contains chapters which propose novel and innovative tools for analysis of the city. What is especially crucial in this publication is the highly transparent and comprehensive manner in which the authors have presented the ways by which they conducted their explorations of the metropolis. The very presence of such broad descriptions of research not only increases their credibility, but, in many places, also makes this volume a sort of manual delineating how to effectively carry out studies of the city that meet the demands of modernity. Yet another valuable aspect of this book is that it allows the reader to familiarize him or herself with inquiries – often very detailed and local studies – which it would otherwise be very difficult to access. Hence this volume becomes a forum where the most notable scholars of urban sociology meet those who are only just starting their academic careers, and where representatives of Western sociology meet those from beyond the center. Quite crucial is that the editors have managed to create such a space where these different – ideological , theoretical as well as generational – perspectives on urban research can be confronted with one another in a creative, scholarly dialogue. Professor Marek Krajewski, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań Not only the extensive range of topics covered, but, above all, the intellectual level of the chapters – as well as the multinational representation of the authors – render this a volume which will be received with great interest and thoughtful consideration by broad, international circles of readers. These will principally include sociologists, especially those studying urban issues, but also representatives of local governments. Generally speaking, this will draw persons interested in urban politics broadly understood as well as those interested in the social issues of contemporary cities and their prospects for development. This book introduces the reader to the multicolored mosaic of urban problems. It sheds light on them through the prism of various theoretical concepts and methodological approaches. Moreover, it applies the latest technologies for gathering and processing information about the cultural patterns of urban life as well as the structural identities of cities.

English Studies, 2019

Globalizations, 2022

This article explores the theory of the subject and of subjectivity in relation to recent debates on the emergence of cities as spaces that are transforming global politics and international relations. Engaging with the contributions to the theory of the subject in the work of Michael Shapiro, Gayatri Spivak, and Jodi Dean, the argument develops an account of the city as an aesthetic subject. In this account, subjectivity is not a property of an individual human but is instead a force and resource emerging through the subject's engagement in the aporetic boundary practices that define and delimit the subject's possibilities. This understanding of subjectivity is then developed in relation to the material metaphors of urban fabric as explored by China Miéville in his novel, The City & The City. The article concludes by revisiting the idea that cities have emerged as crucial spaces or actors in response to diverse global crises, arguing that accounts of cities that reproduce the model of the subject as an individual with defined properties-in terms of the qualities attributed to the city as it seeks to become a node in globalised networks-also fail to account for the politics of the city as an aesthetic subject. This politics is a 'wild politics', unbounded by the borders that seek to contain and separate fiction and fabrication, concept and material.

ABSTRACT Human being makes an effort to reach an absolute judgement inherently. Just like “cities”. They want life to proceed under control, its' own rationality and in the direction of cognition. At this point a major conflict begins. Today's modernity - rationality and history - tradition with a long past are waiting to collide for each other. It's almost impossible to creat universal and total structures in the light of all the modern discourses. Every settlement, every street, every building have certain characteristics in terms of that culture, perception and inhabitants. To understand and recognize the city, senses should belong to “it” before brains in contrary to the rationalist approach. Wars, especially the World Wars, throw up modernity to the transience of life. First I.World War, then II. World War caused a major trauma as the destruction of people, cities and countries. Big traumas were began to live in their own environment by individuals that are progressive in modernity. Life almost began to stop in cities that were destructed with their structure, vision, past and future. Immediately afterwards, this concerns and efforts to holding on life began to cover pain. At this point, architectural improvements have been effective for the cities that were demolished and struggled to re-stand up. Many items such as modernization, industrialization, urbanization begin to create traces through the texture and posture of the city. Should ‘connection with the past’ or ‘directly future orientation’ be effective for the settlement that wants to stand up to move on the road? Initially everything should be open, then all administrative and architectural decisions should be taken. First option for the city should restore a living organism with its' own dynamics. A place, in which its' people live their lives with the consciousness of their past, can entirely be "CITY". Necessary decisions about cities' own dynamics should be taken and make arrangements before important connections between regions, intersections, meeting points and transport networks. In order to reach right solutions, planning should be based on the transition from human& building scale to architectural scale. All the vital criterias should be determined carefully by emphasizing on the concepts as transformation, transition, interaction and ergonomics. From now on studies should be made for the creation of a real city. KEY WORDS: modernization, organism, inhabitants, settlement, building scale, architectural scale.