From Housing to the City: A Design Methodology for an Inter-Scale Analysis Tool with a Gender Perspective

Performance, anxiety

Embodied Perceptions of Darkness

Literature on immigrant housing and assimilation has shown how housing policies perpetuate, create and contest racial boundaries. This paper argues for the necessity to look at the regulation of domestic space together with the regulation of the urban space. By reading “along” and “against” the archival grain, this paper looks at housing policies that targeted the North-African migrant population in the 1960s and 1970s in France as colonial continuities. French authorities ostensibly encouraged gendered assimilation through spatial politics and interventions in the domestic space. Literature on the French context has shown how this perpetuated racialisation in the housing process. Building upon feminist scholarship on gender, intimacy, and colonialism, this paper shows how these policies did not acknowledge interracialised households and prevented interracialised intimacies. This helps understand how housing policies can reinforce racialised exclusion by regulating racial boundaries in the urban space and the domestic space together.

Geoarchaeological and archaeobotanical techniques are increasingly applied to the study of urban and domestic space. However, they are seldom performed as part of an integrative approach, where the soil and botanical micro-records are used together. This paper presents the preliminary results of ongoing research at Songo Mnara in Tanzania that combines customised intra-site soil macro- and micromorphological analyses, chemical analysis and the study of phytoliths. The research is part of a multidisciplinary project on the use of urban space in Swahili stonetowns. By eliciting multiple datasets from Songo Mnara, this paper illustrates the potential of integrating geoarchaeology and archaeobotany to investigate the use of space in urban contexts. The approach is a novelty within the context of Swahili archaeology and an emerging one in Africa.

This paper investigates the political implications of public art using frameworks of conflict and antagonism. We introduce ‘restor(y)ing’ as an analytical scaling device for examining public art’s potential to destabilise official planning processes and reclaim cities through acts of re-telling (restorying) and re-making (restoring) urban spaces. We probe how commissioned/formal and unsolicited/informal public art practices can concurrently operate as artistic activism – or ‘artivism’ – to subvert the status quo in urban contexts that encounter rising socio-spatial inequalities. We deploy restor(y)ing both as an epistemic and real-world commitment to challenging hegemonic powers, and thus amplify activist agendas of marginalised communities. Our argument demonstrates how such politics of restor(y)ing works as a device to unpack conflictual interrelations between ‘æffects’: affects and effects that political public art can invoke simultaneously, yet potentially unevenly. The politics of æffects reveal contestations around public art in urban planning contexts and policies, public communication, and reception. They foreground intended inclusions vs. systemic exclusions (politics of effects) and the emanating impacts on urban belonging vs. alienation (politics of affects). While much public art scholarship accentuates its alleged positive benefits, we attend to the (oft-ambiguous) negative, conflict-attuned æffects of public art. Ultimately, we advocate for an intersectional approach to restor(y)ing urban justice through public artivism.

The sustainable renewal design of urban vulnerable spaces is critical for urban space quality improvement. Taking Zhengzhou and surrounding cities as examples, a cognitive framework of urban vulnerable spaces is constructed. The three types of urban vulnerable spaces are vulnerable population, vulnerable cultural, and vulnerable forgotten spaces. Their sustainable renewal design elements comprise multidimensional factors, such as functional requirement, space organization, activity facility, urban context continuation, and material texture. The design elements for the sustainable update of urban vulnerable spaces are evaluated by grey relation analysis (GRA), and update strategies are proposed. The result shows that (1) vulnerable population spaces were shown to have the highest sensitivity to functional requirements and activity facility design elements, while vulnerable cultural spaces have high relevance to urban context continuation and functional requirement design elements. Furthermore, space organization, activity facility, and urban context continuation design elements all show high relevance and importance in vulnerable forgotten spaces. (2) The update of vulnerable population spaces should be designed to achieve functional communion; vulnerable cultural spaces can be reshaped through urban context implantation, and vulnerable forgotten spaces can use space creation to enhance ecological space continuity, achieving sustainable renewal. The study provides a reference for decision-making for improving urban vulnerable habitats and the sustainable renewal design of atypical urban space types.

Environmental management in tourism: students' perceptions and managerial practice in restaurants from a gender perspective

James Baldwin's novel Another Country begins with suicide of Rufus Scott, a young black jazz musician who spends last month of his life alone and homeless, fried with anguish, and roaming Manhattan's streets. Although Rufus dies within novel's first hundred pages, he is Another Country's most important character, structuring narrative through a series of relationships and memories each evoked by his death. Even before Rufus's ultimate month of wandering, he is dispossessed of a permanent home. Having years before left his parents' in Harlem, Rufus finds himself--and eventually, his white Southern girlfriend, Leona--living in a series of increasingly shabby East Village and Lower East Side apartments. Racism, poverty, and violence all thwart Rufus's attempts to claim a permanent home, and condemn him to a life of temporary habitation until last nights of his life, when he sleeps in movie theaters and finds warmth in all-night diners. While Rufus's experience of domestic impermanence is most protracted, all of characters of Another Country find themselves, at some point in novel, moving from one to another, attempting to create life. To say that Rufus Scott is absent protagonist of Another Country is not a unique claim; that his life and death shape everything that occurs afterwards is a point agreed upon by many. My reading argues that Rufus, as absent protagonist, is equally central to framing of novel's spatial logic. His dispossession and eventual homelessness disrupt and interrogate symbolic and material value of home and call into question limitations imposed by available postwar discourses of home and family. This reading of various domestic and public spaces within Another Country relies on distinction between and made by Michel de Certeau's claim that space is a practiced place (117). Certeau allows us to understand that exists on a map or as a proper noun, but is created through lived experience, and while is knowable and mappable in specific geo-political terms, is layered with both visible and veiled histories, signs, symbols, and experiences. (1) Using this language, and building on important literary work that has arisen in last fifteen years in area of cultural geography, this reading of Another Country argues for an understanding of material world occupied by Baldwin's characters as informed by and informing the socio (2) spatial dialectic. This approach to reading Another Country not only allows for a reading of space as a system of meanings--to see ... as text--but also reminds us of important work of literary interventions and multiple possibilities for (re)imagining national, urban, and domestic spaces (Jarvis 4). Another Country was published in 1962, at a time when Baldwin was deeply engaged with larger conversation and debate between black nationalism and civil fights movement. (3) In November 1962 New Yorker article Letter from a Region in My Mind, Baldwin reflects on a dinner he shared with Elijah Muhammad at Nation of Islam headquarters in Chicago. (4) Baldwin highlights Muhammad's discussion of land and nation as a moment of particular agreement and enlightened understanding: And I looked again at young faces around table, and looked back at Elijah, who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And table said, Yes, that's right. I could not deny truth of this statement. For everyone else has, is , a nation, with a specific location and a flag--even, these days, Jew. It is only the so-called American Negro who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognize him as a human being. (Region 115-16; original emphasis) Baldwin's prose lends a precision and clarity to ideological, symbolic, and material interrelatedness of land ownership, national belonging, and claims to full citizenship in African American context. …

Domestic space in the singular has become a generic term for the private space of the house, the household, or the home as opposed to the public space of the street or the urban space of the city as a whole. Yet, the domestic space concept has only a short scholarly history, especially in its opposition to public space. In the late 1970s the duality of domestic versus public space was criticized by feminist scholars for the patriarchal dominance of the public, male domain of the street over the secluded female domain of the house. This gendered opposition also paralleled an important economic schism in industrial, or so‐called capitalist, societies of the unpaid domestic labor of women versus the wage labor of male breadwinners performed outside the domestic domain. The terminology of domestic spaces in the plural is even more recent and implicitly criticizes the bipolarity of the domestic/public opposition. As such, the plural acknowledges not only the internal zoning of domestic space according to usage, age, and gender, but also a more gradual transition of public and private spaces in modern domestic architecture.

In an ethnoarchaeological case study, we take a gendered perspective on the house as a locus of political life in Conambo, a village of about 200 Achuar- and Quichua-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this small-scale society, women and men engage actively in political practice in independent yet complementary ways, and the domestic context is a place where political life is conducted on a daily basis. In this article, the house is examined as a politicized context at three scales of materiality: the organization of settlement in the community, the spatial relationships in the house, and the scale of painted designs on pottery bowls used in the house. At each scale, we identify material correlates of women's and men's participation. Our goal is to bring attention to potential archaeological correlates of women's political involvement in past societies, to question assumptions about women's political lives and domestic spaces, and to expand the ways in which anthropological archaeology may contribute to understanding cross-cultural variation in women's and men's domains of power.

In the context of urban land-use growth and the consequent impacts on the environment, green spaces provide ecosystem services for human health. The ecosystem services concept synthesises human–environmental interactions through a series of combined components of biodiversity and abiotic elements, linking ecological processes and functions. The concept of green infrastructure (GI) in the urban context emphasises the quality and quantity of urban and peri-urban green spaces and natural areas. In dense urban contexts, the applications of GI are limited and not applied to the potential urban spaces such as roofs and gardens. Often, roofs are characterised by impermeable paved surfaces with negative effects on human well-being, whereas garden designs do not consider social needs and environmental interactions. The role of urban stressors or the urban context as a driving force or pressure of urban green space is not always well understood and employed in the planning of green spaces. This is partly due to a knowledge gap between different science disciplines that operate on different scales, from single processes of the plants (which focus on plant responses to environmental stresses affecting human well-being) to urban ecosystems (which focus on the biodiversity and urban space planning–human well-being relationship). This can create a paradox, as green spaces that are not adequately designed might not produce the expected effects. In this paper, an overview of benefits and limitations of applying the ecosystem services approach when designing green spaces is presented. The focus is on the main urban ecosystem services provided by green roofs and community gardens such as GI that can represent strategies to provide ecological and social multifunctionality to waterproofed surfaces connected to the buildings and low-exploited gardens being the main areas that affect dense urban settlements, and thus, increasing the ecosystem services in the urban environment, such as reducing the Urban Heat Island, as well as flooding events. Specifically, the paper highlights (i) feedback between ecological processes and functions that support ecosystem services, (ii) urban environmental stresses in relation to disservices that these can create for human well-being and (iii) key issues that should be considered in the planning and design of urban ecosystem services. Such a new vision of urban ecosystem services highlights the need to look at GI as an active part of the urban space design in the built environment.

Verandahs of Power: Colonialism and Space in Urban Africa. By Garth Andrew Myers. Space, Place, and Society. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Pp. xxii, 199; 16 illustrations. $19.95 paper. Verandahs of Power is a departure of sorts from traditional Africanist writing about the colonial era. Garth Myers follows well-trodden ground in looking at the colonial state's exercise of power in urban eras, but he also offers a nuanced and even sympathetic-though still critical-look at colonial officials and Asians employed by the colonial state. In addition, he lets his narrative cross the boundary between colonial and postcolonial and thereby brings to light many interesting continuities between the agendas of colonialist governments and those that succeeded them. The book is a study of British attempts to use urban space both to earn the goodwill of their subjects and to exercise power in Nairobi, Lusaka, and Zanzibar, and the continuation of those efforts in postcolonial Lilongwe. The analytical thread that holds it together is the work of Eric Dutton, who was the long-time chief secretary in Zanzibar, but who also worked in Lusaka and Nairobi. His protege, Ajit Singh, a Sikh architect who worked on urban planning and design in Zanzibar and later in Lilongwe, serves to extend the story to revolutionary Zanzibar and independent Malawi. Myers uses several metaphors to hold the four cities together. The most prominent of these is the House of Wonders, the most prominent building in Zanzibar and the administrative center of colonial Zanzibar, which Myers uses to describe the colonial hierarchy. The House of Wonders was built by the Omanis, but conveniently it has three verandahs that encircle it one above the other, allowing it to work as metaphor for state-imposed racial hierarchy. Thus we have the bottom verandah inhabited by the governed, the middle verandah inhabited by Indian and African bureaucrats (whom Myers refers to as the colonized middle), and on the top level the British. A second analytical device that he employs is the work of Timothy Mitchell, which argues that the state attempts to enframe, contain, and observe urban space.1 In each of the four cities the state has attempted to use urban planning to enframe, contain, and observe urban space. The people on the top verandah set the policy, the people on the middle verandah play a crucial role in implementing it, and the people on the bottom verandah quickly undermine it and impose or reimpose their own notions of how urban and domestic space should be used. In each of the four cities this pattern unfolds in different ways and with different results, but Myers does a good job of fitting it all into the theory. He convincingly modifies and extends Mitchell's work by showing that it is not just colonial regimes that behave this way. Myers's bigger contribution to the field is to write about colonial officials and Indians as real people. While there is a growing recognition that colonial policy was not the result of a monolithic and single-minded colonial state, we rarely actually get to meet flesh-and-blood colonial officials. His description of Eric Button is fascinating and goes a long way toward showing the tragic side of the colonial experience. …

This chapter looks at how space is domesticated inside and outside the house for Jewish purposes. It considers the consequences of constructing an eruv in London and the controversies that this engendered. Structurally, the eruv (technically, eruv ḥatserot, meaning ‘a mingling of courtyards’) is an urban space whose disparate areas are regarded halakhically as forming a single unit by virtue of the contiguity of its boundaries. Here, the chapter examines the experience of the structure as built, rather than discussing the detail of its planning and construction. Furthermore, it focuses on ordinary Jews rather than on the Jewish leadership, and on women's lives rather than men's. Of methodological interest here is the investigation of space objectively and subjectively by inviting participants to draw cognitive maps of their public and domestic spaces.

In the global age the public sphere, the weaving of relationships between people and contexts, seems to have undergone a loss of meaning. The article analyses the way in which the crisis of the public sphere can find in urban spaces opportunities for a regeneration that would allow the development of individual and collective identities. Social dynamics unquestionably shape the urban space. Conversely, the urban space structures historical and social processes. In other words, the urban public space is where an incessant translation practice takes form: the unfolding of a “third space,” an intermediate dimension, where differences are articulated.

Multilingualism in urban spaces is mainly studied as an oral practice. Nevertheless, linguistic landscape studies can serve as a good explorative method for studying multilingualism in written practices. Moreover, resent research on linguistic landscapes (Blommaert 2013; Shohamy et. al. 2010; Backhaus 2006) have shed some light on the power relations between different ethnic groups in urban public space. Multilingual practices exist in a certain ideological context, and not only official language policy but speaker linguistic stereotypes and attitudes can influence and modify those practices. Historically, South Korea tended to be oriented towards monolingualism; one nation-one people-one language ideology was domineering public discourse. However, globalization and recent increase in migration resulted in gradual changes in attitudes towards multilingualism (Lo and Kim 2012). The linguistic landscapes of Seoul, on the one hand, reflect these changes, and However, they demonstrates pragmatic inequality of languages other than South Korean in public use. This inequality, though, is represented differently in certain spatial urban contexts. The proposed paper aims at analyzing data on linguistic landscapes of Seoul, South Korea ,with the focus on different contexts of language use and different sets of norms and ideological constructs underlying particular linguistic choices. In my presentation I will examine data from three urban contexts: ‘general’ (typical for most public spaces); ‘foreign-oriented’ (seen in tourist oriented locations such as airport, expensive hotels, or popular historical sites, which dominates the Itaewon district); and ‘ethnic-oriented’ (specific for spaces created by and for ethnic minority groups, such as Mongolian / Central Asian / Russian districts near the Dongdaemun History and Culture Park station). I will show that foreign languages used in public written communication are embedded into different frameworks in these three urban contexts, and that the patterns of their use vary from pragmatically oriented ones to predominately symbolic ones, with English functioning as a substitution for other foreign languages, as an emblem of ‘foreignness.’