November 17, 2011 – 2:43 pm
The authors of the Frankfurt School maintained that a radical change in society was necessary; however, they always refused to suggest any practice. The role of the thinker, as famously argued by Adorno, was not to engage with society and politics in a direct fashion, because this would imply being caught in a stream [...]
April 16, 2011 – 11:00 am
By external contributor Miguel Torres-Garcia.
Today we conceive urban space to have a substance of itself. Architectural proposals take part in it, and produce it to a certain extent, but I wonder if there are still areas beyond the discipline’s reach. In this text I will use a few samples across time, starting by a comparison [...]
The separation barrier sneaking by Abu Dis from the al-Quds University campus, on 8 December 2010. These Palestinian landscapes are naturally very contrasted and defined, and with their sparse vegetation they often resemble the backdrops of some Italian early Renaissance paintings.
The wall in its context is a text-book example of low entropy structure. Like an [...]
Al Bayyadah is a town in Cyrenaica that was founded in 1938 and originally called D’Annunzio, after the famous Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio. These agricultural settlements were built around an architectural core formed by a church, an administrative building, and a section of the Fascist party, which functioned as space for events and public gatherings: “God, [...]
February 28, 2011 – 8:00 am
One year ago, I wrote some notes on the urban public spaces of China (see post Reading the Urban Spaces of China). In it, I made a small reflection on the accelerating urbanization in China on the one hand and the differences in use of the public space between Western and non-Western countries on the [...]
November 2, 2010 – 12:00 pm
A loose reaction to this post by Patricia Simoes-Aelbrecht and thoughts on assemblage theory.
The dichotomy of public and private is something that has long been criticised in social theory. A common strand through Arendt (1956), Habermas (1962, 1992) and Sennett (1974) is that it is impossible, in Modern society, to speak of a clear boundary [...]
Sent by Stephanie Brandt:
The Urban Islands Project – reviving places:
www.urbanislandsproject.net
The Urban Islands Project is part of an ongoing project SPACEPILOTS introduced in 2009 under the title of Unlocking the City, aiming to excite young people about their city, engage them with their environment, and to empower them to get involved in the actual shaping of [...]
December 15, 2009 – 10:17 am
The ‘sociology of public space’ is a research area still rather unknown and unexplored. Until recently, most social sciences conventional wisdom was that the public realm was inhabited and asocial (Simmel, 1903, Wirth, 1938). Their essential argument was always that public spaces of the city were densely filled with visual and sounds stimulus overload and [...]
October 6, 2009 – 11:55 pm
[REMEMBERANCE OF SMELLS PAST. A BBC World Service programme]
“How do smells impact on memories and emotions? Science is unraveling how a whiff of perfume or a newly mown lawn can offer us a free ticket back to our childhood.”
August 27, 2009 – 11:26 am
Sent by Stephanie Brandt:
Living Landscapes Lecture Series*
Autumn 2009
Session 1 (5 October 2009): Public space and politics
Session 2 (2 November 2009): Art and agency: art and the creative city
Session 3 (7 December 2009): Alternative/subversive urban practices
Time: 18:30 – 20:30
Location: The Building Centre, Store Street, London, WC1E 7BT, (http://www.buildingcentre.co.uk)
Free admission
*Sponsored by the AIA [...]