Liora Bigon – författare

This book is focused on the street-naming politics, policies and practices that have been shaping and reshaping the semantic, textual and visual environments of urban Africa and Israel. Its chapters expand on prominent issues, such as the importance of extra-formal processes, naming reception and unofficial toponymies, naming decolonisation, place attachment, place-making and the materiality of street signage. By this, the book directly contributes to the mainstreaming of Africa’s toponymic cultures in recent critical place-names studies. Unconventionally and experimentally, comparative glimpses are made throughout between toponymic experiences of African and Israeli cities, exploring pioneering issues in the overwhelmingly Eurocentric research tradition. The latter tends to be concentrated on Europe and North America, to focus on nationalistic ideologies and regime change and to over-rely on top-down ‘mere’ mapping and street indexing. This volume is also unique in incorporating a rich and stimulating variety of visual evidence from a wide range of African and Israeli cities. The materiality of street signage signifies the profound and powerful connections between structured politics, current mundane practices, historical traditions and subaltern cultures.

Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel is an important contribution to urban studies, toponymic research and African studies for scholars and students.

Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003173762

This book is focused on the street-naming politics, policies and practices that have been shaping and reshaping the semantic, textual and visual environments of urban Africa and Israel. Its chapters expand on prominent issues, such as the importance of extra-formal processes, naming reception and unofficial toponymies, naming decolonisation, place attachment, place-making and the materiality of street signage. By this, the book directly contributes to the mainstreaming of Africa’s toponymic cultures in recent critical place-names studies. Unconventionally and experimentally, comparative glimpses are made throughout between toponymic experiences of African and Israeli cities, exploring pioneering issues in the overwhelmingly Eurocentric research tradition. The latter tends to be concentrated on Europe and North America, to focus on nationalistic ideologies and regime change and to over-rely on top-down ‘mere’ mapping and street indexing. This volume is also unique in incorporating a rich and stimulating variety of visual evidence from a wide range of African and Israeli cities. The materiality of street signage signifies the profound and powerful connections between structured politics, current mundane practices, historical traditions and subaltern cultures.

Street-Naming Cultures in Africa and Israel is an important contribution to urban studies, toponymic research and African studies for scholars and students.

Chapters 1 and 2 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003173762

Splintering Towers of Babel focuses on and redefines soft infrastructures and critical infrastructure projects. It explores key issues in contemporary urban studies including town planning histories, architecture, heritage, colonialism and postcolonialism, philosophy, and ethics.

The book combines transdisciplinary perspectives on the key historical, philosophical, and political issues associated with urban experiences, built forms, and infrastructure networks. It explores uneven dimensions in contemporary urbanisms and develops spatial phenomenological thinking with reference to the northern and southern hemispheres. This book connects the past and the present, in addition to Western and global South geographies, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Its main contribution is to broaden readers'' understanding of infrastructure through the lens of the humanities and to engage with political, poetical, and ethical perspectives.

This book is tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban planning, urban geography, architectural history, urban design, infrastructure studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, African studies, and philosophy.

Splintering Towers of Babel focuses on and redefines soft infrastructures and critical infrastructure projects. It explores key issues in contemporary urban studies including town planning histories, architecture, heritage, colonialism and postcolonialism, philosophy, and ethics.

The book combines transdisciplinary perspectives on the key historical, philosophical, and political issues associated with urban experiences, built forms, and infrastructure networks. It explores uneven dimensions in contemporary urbanisms and develops spatial phenomenological thinking with reference to the northern and southern hemispheres. This book connects the past and the present, in addition to Western and global South geographies, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Its main contribution is to broaden readers'' understanding of infrastructure through the lens of the humanities and to engage with political, poetical, and ethical perspectives.

This book is tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban planning, urban geography, architectural history, urban design, infrastructure studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, African studies, and philosophy.

This book is the first to trace the genealogy of an indigenous grid-pattern settlement design practice in Africa, and more specifically in Senegal. It does so by analyzing how the precolonial grid-plan design tradition of this country has become entangled with French colonial urban grid-planning, and with present-day, hybrid, planning cultures. By thus, it transcends the classic precolonial-colonial-postcolonial metahistorical divides.

This properly illustrated book consists of five chapters, including an introductory chapter (historiography, theory and context) and a concluding chapter. The chapters’ text has both a chronological and thematic rationale, aimed at enhancing Islamic Studies by situating sub-Saharan Africa’s urbanism within mainstream research on the Muslim World; and at contributing directly to the wider project of de-Eurocentrizing urban planning history by developing a more inclusive, truly global, urban history.

By combining in-depth area studies research – some of the contributions are of ethnographic quality – with colonial history, planning history and geography, the authors intend to show that culture matters in research on place names.  This volume goes beyond the recent understanding obtained in critical studies of nomenclature, normally based on lists of official names, that place naming reflects the power of political regimes, nationalism, and ideology.

This book is the first edited collection to bring together classic and contemporary writings on the urban grid in a single volume. The contributions showcased in this book examine the spatial histories of the grid from multiple perspectives in a variety of urban contexts. They explore the grid as both an indigenous urban form and a colonial imposition, a symbol of Confucian ideals and a spatial manifestation of the Protestant ethic, a replicable model for real estate speculation within capitalist societies and a spatial framework for the design of socialist cities. By examining the entangled histories of the grid, Gridded Worlds considers the variegated associations of gridded urban space with different political ideologies, economic systems, and cosmological orientations in comparative historical perspective. In doing so, this interdisciplinary anthology seeks to inspire new avenues of research on the past, present, and future of the gridded worlds of urban life. 

Gridded Worlds is primarily tailored to scholars working in the fields of urban history, world history, urban historical geography, architectural history, urban design, and the history of urban planning, and it will also be of interest to art historians, area studies scholars, and the urban studies community more generally.