Cities and Cultures – serie

Gentrification is reshaping cities worldwide, resulting in seductive spaces and exclusive communities that aspire to innovation, creativity, sustainability, and technological sophistication. Gentrification is also contributing to growing social-spatial division and urban inequality and precarity. In a time of escalating housing crisis, unaffordable cities, and racial tension, scholars speak of eco-gentrification, techno-gentrification, super-gentrification, and planetary gentrification to describe the different forms and scales of involuntary displacement occurring in vulnerable communities in response to current patterns of development and the hype-driven discourses of the creative city, smart city, millennial city, and sustainable city. In this context, how do contemporary creative practices in art, architecture, and related fields help to produce or resist gentrification? What does gentrification look and feel like in specific sites and communities around the globe, and how is that appearance or feeling implicated in promoting stylized renewal to a privileged public? In what ways do the aesthetics of gentrification express contested conditions of migration and mobility? Addressing these questions, this book examines the relationship between aesthetics and gentrification in contemporary cities from multiple, comparative, global, and transnational perspectives.

The narrative of the birth of internet culture often focuses on the achievements of American entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, but there is an alternative history of internet pioneers in Europe who developed their own model of network culture in the early 1990s. Drawing from their experiences in the leftist and anarchist movements of the ’80s, they built DIY networks that give us a glimpse into what internet culture could have been if it were in the hands of squatters, hackers, punks, artists, and activists. In the Dutch scene, the early internet was intimately tied to the aesthetics and politics of squatting. Untethered from profit motives, these artists and activists aimed to create a decentralized tool that would democratize culture and promote open and free exchange of information.

A few months into the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region in 2009/10, the promises of social media, including its ability to influence a participatory governance model, grassroots civic engagement, new social dynamics, inclusive societies and new opportunities for businesses and entrepreneurs, became more evident than ever. Simultaneously, cartography received new considerable interest as it merged with social media platforms. In an attempt to rearticulate the relationship between media and mapping practices, whilst also addressing new and social media, this interdisciplinary book abides by one relatively clear point: space is a media product. The overall focus of this book is accordingly not so much on the role of new technologies and social networks as it is on how media and mapping practices expand the very notion of cultural engagement, political activism, popular protest and social participation.

This book explores what’s happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of how this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life.

Temporary urbanism has become a distinctive feature of urban life after the 2008 global financial crisis. This book offers a critical exploration of its emergence and establishment as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration policies and planning. Drawing on seven years of semi-ethnographic research, it explores the politics of temporariness from a situated analysis of neighbourhood transformation, media representations and wider political and cultural shifts in austerity London. Through a longitudinal engagement with projects and practitioners, the book tests the power of aesthetic and cultural interventions and highlights tensions between the promise of vacant space re-appropriation and its commodification. Against the normalisation of ephemerality, it presents a critique of the permanence of temporary urbanism as a glamorisation of the anticipatory politics of precarity which are transforming cities, subjectivities and imaginaries of urban action.

As sites of continual change and transformation, cities are fundamentally forgetful places. Yet at the same time, urban areas are also homes to museums and archives that collect and exhibit the past-a key cultural, political, and economic activity. This book looks at that paradox through the example of Berlin to see how the city has responded to challenges to memory created by rapid changes in politics, economics, society, and the built environment, ultimately arguing that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in the contemporary city.

Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters after Dusk captures the multifarious nature of the urban night and how it is lived, structured, and reflected upon in diverse cultural and artistic expressions. The volume acknowledges the urban night as an often-overlooked key dimension necessary to understand the complexities of today's urban spaces, including the often-polarizing question of migration. After dusk, urban social challenges are often magnified, as questions of who can be where and when, along ethnic, racial or gender lines, for example, gain an additional dimension. The volume underscores, indeed, the multi-dimensionality of night spaces, where bottom-up, grassroot initiatives provide opportunities for self-expression by traditionally marginalized and silenced groups. Chapters span disciplines of urbanism and urban history, literary, film and cultural studies, music, sociology of labour, anthropology of migration, alongside autoethnographic contributions and practice-based photo essays by artists for whom the night is their habitual setting and canvas.

Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe investigates visual cultural projects in Europe from the 1970s onwards in response to industrial closures, resultant unemployment, diminished social services and shattered identities. Typically, art and visual cultural creations at one-time thriving European heartlands strive to make the industrial past visible, negotiable, and re-imaginable. Authors discuss varied and multiple types of art and visual culture that remember the sometimes-invisible past, create community in the face of social disintegration, and navigate the dissonance between past and present material reality. They also examine art and visual objects at post-industrial European sites for their aesthetic, historical, and sociological role within official and unofficial, government and community regeneration and re-vitalisation efforts. Sites range from former coal and steel plants in Duisburg, through shipyards and harbours of Gdansk and Hamburg, a Moscow paper factory and textile factories in Albania, to still-functioning Croatian metalworks.

From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, imagined, documented, navigated, mediated and visualized. Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of these new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space. The interdisciplinary essays provide new concepts, theories and research methods that combine close analyses of street images and imaginaries with the study of the practices of their production and circulation. The book covers a wide range of visible and invisible geographies — From Hong Kong's streets to Rio's favelas, from Sydney's suburbs to London's street markets, and from Damascus' war-torn streets to Istanbul's sidewalks — and engages with multiple ways in which visualizations of the street function to document street protests and urban change, to build imaginaries of urban communities and alternate worlds, and to help navigate streetscapes.

Urban Nightlife and Contested Spaces: Cultural Encounters after Dusk captures the multifarious nature of the urban night and how it is lived, structured, and reflected upon in diverse cultural and artistic expressions.

Visual Culture of Post-Industrial Europe investigates visual cultural projects in Europe from the 1970s onwards in response to industrial closures, resultant unemployment, diminished social services and shattered identities.

This volume invites readers to rediscover Amsterdam through the intimate lens of its inhabitants. Amsterdam Diaries, Life Writing and Identity offers a rich and layered portrayal of the city through the self-narratives of ‘ordinary’ individuals from the eighteenth century to the present.

China is urbanizing at an unprecedented speed. Filmmakers, artists, musicians, and writers all try to come to terms with the changes of their city. How is the Chinese city-as-spectacle, visualised and thus imagined and reimagined, if not contested, in art and popular culture? What are the possible escape routes from a completely commodified cityscape? How to realign artistic expressions of the spectacle with everyday practices? The imaginations of the Chinese city in art and popular culture that this book explores are not taken as merely mirroring or reflecting ŸrealityŒ, on the contrary, they are part and parcel of the construction, destruction and deconstruction of that ŸrealityŒ. As such, these imaginations are enmeshed in the social, material and political realities that produce Chinese cityscapes. Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Art and Popular Culture brings together essays by an interdisciplinary team of experts on Chinese cities, including world-renowned scholars like Ackbar Abbas and Chua Beng Huat, as well as leading cultural critics like Ou Ning. Aiming to steer away from an exclusive focus on Mainland China, the adjective Chinese has a cultural meaning and includes places like Singapore and Hong Kong.

The Cinema of Urban Crisis explores the relationships between cinema and urban crises in the United States and Europe in the 1970s.

A case study of Berlin to see how the city has responded to challenges to memory created by rapid changes in politics, economics, society, and the built environment, ultimately arguing that the recovery of the experience of time is central to the practices of an emergent memory culture in the contemporary city.

Visualizing the Street investigates the social and cultural significance of new developments at the intersection of visual culture and urban space.

This book offers a critical exploration of the emergence and establishment of temporary urbanism, as a seductive discourse and as an entangled field of practice encompassing architecture, visual and performative arts, urban regeneration policies and planning.

he overall focus of this book is accordingly not so much on the role of new technologies and social networks as it is on how media and mapping practices expand the very notion of cultural engagement, political activism, popular protest and social participation.

This collection of case studies focuses on a largely unexplored topic that no book has yet investigated gentrification and the media. There is an emphasis on the theoretical and methodological issues raised when media sources are used to study gentrification by non-media specialists who primarily focus on space and communities.

The book brings together a unique and diverse group of global scholars/researchers to reframe gentrification debates from a comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective.

This book is about how in the Dutch scene, the early internet was intimately tied to the aesthetics and politics of squatting. Untethered from profit motives, these artists and activists aimed to create a decentralized tool that would democratize culture and promote open and free exchange of information.

Transformational Participatory Urbanism explores making do as a critical spatial practice at the intersection of spatial justice and creative geography. Through cases from Hong Kong’s Lennon Walls and San Francisco Bay mudflats to containerbased sanitation in Haiti and Toronto’s strip mall parking lots, contributors show how people rework urban space under constraint—through adaptation, care, and resistance. Grounded in de Certeau, Levi-Strauss, Soja, and Haraway, the volume frames making do as urban bricolage: Materially inventive, politically assertive, and speculative about more just futures.Organised in three parts—Discourse, Process, and Engagement—the book ranges from theory to field practice. Essays examine self-build housing manuals in Mexico, tactics of market curation and participation, artistic interventions in Chinatown, gardening as reparative practice, mud and ruins as co-authors of landscape, sidewalk vernaculars, and maintenance as creative care. Engagement chapters consider sanitation knowledge transfer in Haiti, solidarity clinics in Athens, civic commons on private parking lots (plazaPOPS), and Taipei’s Nanji Rice as commoning infrastructure. Together, these chapters foreground situated knowledge, minor tactics, and claims to spatial agency.This book is written for scholars, practitioners, and advanced students in landscape architecture, urban design and planning, architecture, geography, and visual culture as well as civic leaders, nongovernmental organisations, and community organisers seeking low-cost, high-impact approaches to equitable placemaking.