The City in a Different Way: Space in the Essay “Rational Decisions” by Giedra Radvilavičiūtė

Sites of Protest: Rethinking Everyday Spaces as Sites for Protesting the Marginalisation of Difference

This chapter presents the research questions, approaches, and arguments of the book, asking how our everyday lives with media have changed after the smartphone. I introduce the topic of media use in everyday life as an empirical, methodological, and theoretical research interest, and argue for its continued centrality to our digital society today, accentuated by datafication. I discuss how the analytical concepts of media repertories and public connection can inform research into media use in everyday life, and what it means that our societies and user practices are becoming more digital. The main argument of the book is that digital media transform our navigation across the domains of everyday life by blurring boundaries, intensifying dilemmas, and affecting our sense of connection to communities and people around us. The chapter concludes by presenting the structure of the rest of the book, where these arguments will be substantiated in analysis of media use an ordinary day, media use in life phase transitions, and media use when ordinary life is disrupted. Can you remember your first smartphone, and did it change your life? I bought my first smartphone in the early summer of 2011, right before the birth of my first child. I can safely say that life was never the same again. Although the new phone was hardly the most significant change that happened, it became part of how I reconfigured everyday life. My coincidental timing of these events might be a personal particularity, but the early 2010s, only a little more than a decade ago, was a period in which smartphones became part of everyday life for lots of people. This happened in Norway where I live, and in other countries in the Global North, soon followed by broader proliferation worldwide (Avle et al., 2020). In 2021, it was estimated that more than 90 per cent of people had smartphone access in a growing number of countries around the globe (Deloitte, 2021). 'Smartphones changed everything', wrote the Wall Street Journal in 2020: 'smartphones upended every element of society during the last decade, from dating to dinner parties, travel to politics. This is just the beginning' (Kitchen, 9.9.2020). But while all of this was happening, people lived their lives, using smartphones along with other media old and new, interwoven with what was going on in their lives, and in the world around them. This book explores the role of media in our everyday lives in digital societies, after the proliferation of smartphones and in conditions of ubiquitous connectivity. I analyze everyday media use across platforms, content types and modes of communication, taking the perspective of how we live our lives with media -how we manage plans and practicalities, keep in touch with friends and family, seek information and entertainment, work and learn, take part in shared experiences, and connect to our social lifeworlds. We might do all of this in the space of one single day, and we might experience such a day as 'ordinary' -just normal everyday life. But media technologies are also part of our less ordinary days, important to how we manage life-changing transitions and special events in our personal lives, and to how we relate to local communities, political processes or global events. We use media to connect to each other, and to society -throughout an ordinary day, across the life course, and in times of disruption. The smartphone is emblematic of how our everyday lives with media are changing in a digital and hyper-connected society, and as such it is essential to the topic of this book. A central question I discuss is what it means that most of us now have a smartphone to reach for, from where we are and what we are doing, to manage multiple aspects of our daily lives: A mobile, flexible device we rely on to communicate, find information, entertain and assist us, often used in combination with other media, but also a device that enables tracking and surveillance of our movements and engagements, informing feedback loops based on our personal data. How has digital media use in everyday life changed after the smartphone?

With the performative in social sciences and the humanities the concept of performance has arrived in human geography. Performance denotes an understanding of social actions and practices as consti- tutive for non-representational realities. This paper looks at the relationship between and performance especially in urban geography and develops the new term situational place to grasp the increasing phe- nomenon of (intercultural) encounters in the cities of modern world society. Situational places are situated performances of these (intercultural) interactions between strangers in cities of the contemporary world so- ciety. With the aid of performance theory the influence of the omnipresent interactions between strangers in cities on urban space is conceptualized. Therewith, we hope to present some fruitful theoretical and empirical possibilities for a cultural urban geography within and beyond the performative turn. In contemporary human geography many di erent theoreti- cal turns are discussed. The spectrum ranges from the lin- guistic to the somatic, from the spatial to the performative turn. Most of these theoretical turnarounds could be sub- sumed under the broader umbrella of the cultural turn. In this paper we understand turn as a metaphor for a move- ment because it signals and is a sign for the eternal motion contained in human geography. A scholastic fixing of theo- retical concepts in human geography is in many accounts im- possible because of its openness and conceptual complexity. It may well be argued that it is exactly this conceptual flexi- bility and openness, the constant ability to transgress bound- aries, that characterizes human(e) geography as a discipline beyond disciplination. The di erent turns which are dis- cussed in recent human geography could be considered as empirical evidence of sorts for this theoretical thesis. Within this broad field of di erent turns the argument of this paper focuses on one very specific problem: the implications of the performative for urban geography or cultural urban geography. Because the performative gives space for

Biogeographies: Transcending anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene

Relevance. Cities are centers of attraction for people of different nationalities and cultures. In the context of urbanization and globalization, various ethnic cultures interact, which leads to their transformation. The study of ethnic culture in urban space makes it possible to understand how culture changes under the influence of new living conditions, which is especially important for the formation of intercultural relations and tolerant attitude towards representatives of other cultures and nationalities.The purpose is to analyze theoretical studies of ethnic culture in urban space, including issues of tolerance, identity, and urban mentality.Objectives: to consider the elements of ethnic culture; to analyze the connection between ethnic culture and urban space; to determine how identity manifests itself in urban space; to characterize cultural ethnic practices in urban space; to characterize the visual artifacts of ethnicity in urban space.Methodology. The socio-cultural paradigm of studying urban space was used as the methodological basis of the study. The authors also applied general scientific methods: analysis, comparison, generalization.Results. A theoretical analysis of the developments of domestic authors on the topic of manifestations of ethnic culture in urban space, including aspects of national symbols, architecture, mentality, identity, tolerance, is carried out.Conclusions. Ethnic culture in urban space is a complex phenomenon encompassing socio-cultural and ethnodemographic aspects of urban community life. It finds expression in architecture, cultural practices of events, ornaments, everyday life, and the media. Today, despite the unification of everyday life and lifestyle, there are trends towards strengthening national identity, preserving national identity and cultural traditions, in particular through elements of urban public spaces.

Bold Walks in the Inner North: Melbourne Women’s Memoir after Jill Meagher

Recent study on gender representation in children’s literature has focused on the representations themselves, while there is less research regarding how children talk about these depictions in texts. Our work, a qualitative study of how kindergarten-aged children discuss gender during picture book read-alouds, examined how children drew on the social binary of boy/girl as they made sense of the human and non-human characters’ identities. The study looked at how children responded to questions about gender across both ambiguously-gendered characters and texts where gender norms were deliberately questioned. The findings expressed in this paper provide insight into how students’ previous experiences, along with classroom norms and text choice, influence student response. Specifically, we found that children drew on similar social norms and gendered expectations across all character types, demonstrating the importance of these societal categories on their comprehension of texts and on their sense-making of their lives and classrooms. The paper ends with implications for early childhood educators in allowing for more diverse representations when selecting texts and deliberate listening to student conversations to recognize how young learners perceive gender and identity.

Engaging Virginia Woolf’s short fiction “Kew Gardens” and her canine biography Flush as the important texts by which to study the narrative status of non-human characters, this paper aims to investigate possibilities and limitations in representing the subjectivities of non-human characters such as snail and Cocker Spaniel. Posthumanist theories will require close attention in research on how to represent the subjectivity of other species in human language. First, I will focus on comparative analysis of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s becoming-animal and Donna Haraway’s becoming-with. Second, through the conceptual understanding of transdisciplinarity of Cary Wolfe’s, I will explain the significance of reading Woolf’s modernist narrative from Posthumanist perspective. Lastly, I will evaluate the potentiality of Woolf’s non-human characters in terms of a challenge to anthropocentric conceptualizations. Woolf anthropomorphizes the snail as an agency with her imaginative becoming-with. Flush, the canine protagonist is also anthropomorphized to validate the relationship of companion species. Woolf’s non-human characters become with the human characters and in the narrative space, once decentered, the human is relocated.

The question of how strangers live together in relative harmony as cities increase in scale, density and complexity is a growing concern for urban planners, administrators and scholars of the city. Alongside an unease about the potential for things to go awry is speculation about the capacity for public urban space to enhance civic appreciation of living with difference through encounters with strangers. The majority of the world’s population is now living in cities, and random and repetitious encounters with people from all cultures and all walks of life is a central feature of contemporary urban life (Pardy 2011). New and emergent forms of urbanism developing in the twenty-first century require new ways of reconceiving cities. Based on nineteenth-century town planning, the mechanisms of administrative rationality attempt to impose order on everyday life in the city. On some level, strategies are necessarily destined to fail because little account is made of the unruly and unconscious mani festations of citizens’ emotional lives (Lefebvre 1991; Pile 1996; Donald 1999). An ethos of ‘public good’ is frequently predicated on assumptions about how people use and live in cities, and how they should live. I suggest that greater attention to people’s affective engagement in urban space, through an understanding of the experiential realm of city life, can be useful when reconsidering the role and planning of urban public space in contemporary city. The experience of urban life engages distinct psychological, affective and corporeal modalities (Simmel 1950; Sennett 1970; Lefebvre 1991) and urban living requires a ‘creative competence’ (Patton 1995) manifest in tolerance, openness and civility to others, which may be reproduced in the public realm.

Objectives This study aimed to examine how children perceive the gender of human and non-human characters while reading picture books.
 Methods Children’s perception was observed through reading out two different picture books for 48 children of Y kindergarten and S kindergarten in S city, in a primary large-group session and secondary small-group session, then a repetitive and active verbal interaction afterward.
 Results Children displayed a tendency to perceive the gender of the human characters in picture books based on social constructs. Male children largely focused on references to conventions and social constructs, whereas female children focused on visual features such as reference to illustrations, colors, clothes, and physical attributes. In the case of non-human characters, social constructs and references to illustrations had an equivalent degree of influence on the perception of gender. Male children used references to conventions as evidence to perceive the characters’ gender, while female children used references to illustrations and clothes.
 Conclusions By understanding children’s perception of the gender of human and non-human characters in picture books, this study can contribute to composing a children’s literary education curriculum that pursues diversity to diminish gender stereotypes, and deepening meaningful literary interactions with children from the perspective of gender sensitivity.

Traditional urban geography tends to place its research focus on the spatial differentiation of the functions and facilities in the metropolitan region. Little attention, however, has been paid to the drastic changes in everyday life of the urban residents. This review essay tries to overview the recent research trends in various academic fields which have a strong concern with human activities in an urban environment. In this way, some perspectives are suggested for human activity studies in urban geography.Human activities are allocated within both limited time resources and a constrained human activity space, and form the so-called‘human activity pattern’. Here we tentatively subdivided the researches on human activity into three categories: i. e.‘time budget and allocation study’which highlights the time dimension of human activity; ‘spatial behavior study’Which emphasizes the spatial choice; and‘transportation study’ which pays special attention to the human travel pattern. But these three types of studies are intricately entangled with each other and should be treated as a whole. Therefore, in this review essay, we try to understand each of these studies in its own research context and examine how other two types of studies could be evaluated in that context.Our viewpoint is briefly explained in Chapter One, and in the following chapter, we review the time budget and allocation studies in sociology, home economics and microeconomics which treat the time dimension of human activity. Basically, these studies treat the time allocation simply between production and consumption within 24 hours, and tend to be static analyses.In Chapter Three, we trace human activity pattern study in urban planning, human geography and transportation studies. These studies try to answer the question, ‘what activities do people engage in, and why?’The recent. frontier of this research interest is modelling of people's choice of activities within the constrained choice settings. Currently, research foci are on the dynamics of activity pattern change in the long-term and on repetitive patterns in the short-term.Chapter Four takes up time-geographic research in human geography for its tremendous influence on time-related studies. One of the most pronounced characteristics in time-geographic research is its endeavor to incorporate both time and space dimensions as indivisible entities in our understanding of the society. Introduction of an incorporated time-space entity is useful for representation of human activities. More importantly, however, it opens the way to mediation between individual behavior and social structure.Finally in Chapter Five, we discuss new perspectives for understanding of contemporary society. They would emerge from the time-geographical application of human activity studies. Three of them seem especially important. The first perspective is on the value of the identification procedure for ideal types of human activities. The second is on the use of examining human activities from the point of constraints. The third is on the need for a dynamic understanding of the interaction between individuals and society.However affluent it may seem, life in contemporary society is quite deprived when we see it from the point of everday time use. Economists can give support to the fact that economic growth makes time resources more scarce and our everyday life shifts from a time-intensive to a goods-intensive life-style. But we are not satisfied with this trend. We are still looking for clues to escape from the traps of economic growth. We hope this tiny study may help to research this horizon.

Classical Interpretation of Geographical Thought is an academic work co-edited by CAI Yunlong and American scholar Bill Wyckoff, published in 2023. This book offers not only a comprehensive review and in-depth interpretation of modern and contemporary western geographical thought, but also a splendid showcase of classic works in the evolution of geography. This book is a collection of 50 innovative monographs or papers that emerged during the development of Western modern and contemporary geography from 1864 to 2006, which covers all geographical fields such as physical geography, human geography, geographic information science, etc. Through reflection and debate on geographical thought, concept, philosophy, methodology, research content, scientific status and social function, they roughly outline the four significant stages in the development of modern and contemporary geography: Traditional geography, “Scientific” geography, “Human” geography and Diverse geography. Through the deep interpretation of the classical works, it shows the depth and breadth of geographical thought. This paper delves into the evolution of geographical thought, tracing its roots from ancient geographers􀆳 insights into the natural environment, human activities, and geographical phenomena. It then proceeds to analyze the emergence and development of modern geographical thought, exploring the contentions and diverse viewpoints that have shaped modern geography across various schools of thought.

This chapter contributes to the discussion on moving in and through site-specific and urban space; at the cusp between higher dance education and everyday life, creating a post-Certauian tear through space and time as a call for agency. It draws from my Ph.D. research Suriashi as Experimental Pilgrimage in Urban and Other Spaces, where I propose an experience of society from within a Japanese practice called suriashi, which translates as sliding foot. Suriashi is a specific gender codified walking technique in classical Japanese dance and theatre, and an important method for acting on stage. Gender is constructed physically through the positioning and moulding of the body. The original practice is performed in the dance studio or on stage. My research asks whether suriashi also could be a method for agency to act, as being active, or to activate, and temporally alter spaces outside the theatre; i.e. the practical application of this artistic practice outside the theatrical context. This relocation brings a traditional form into new configurations, connecting to everyday practices and sites of resistance and performance. It also contributes to the burgeoning field of walking arts practice, bringing a Japanese dance-based practice into a dialogue with debates and practices of Western dancing and walking. Suriashi performed in urban spaces was able to unfold and identify new relations between aesthetic practice and politics, between movements and monuments in the city as a way to critique the unequal distribution of power, and by looking for new ways to protest/resist peacefully. I assess this from three of my many experiments with slow suriashi walkings. The first one is Suriashi Intervention, performed at Gothenburg Culture Festival in August 2016. This experiment did two things: it engendered the city’s unacknowledged dance archive, while performing critique of the unequal distribution of funding of the arts. The second experiment is an ‘invisible’ suriashi performed by the then Hong Kong-based scholar Ching-yuen Cheung during the violent protests at Yuen Long Station in Hong Kong in July 2019. It showed how artistic methods are necessary when democracy collapses. The third experiment regards introducing suriashi as methodology to master students of Contemporary Performative Arts at University of Gothenburg. Here, suriashi unveiled important issues regarding art in urban spaces, necessary for the art student. To further contextualize, I interlace my arguments through positionings by sociologist Doreen Massey.

市域生态空间是城乡发展的绿色基底和生态基础，其协同联系"山水林田湖草"各生态系统，是动植物和自然生态多种过程的空间载体，同时也是人类进行社会经济活动的场所，与城乡经济社会发展息息相关，良好的市域生态空间体系，是实现市域层面生态系统稳定，协调城市发展和自然保护的重要载体，同时也是实现城市健康良性发展的重要保障。现有的市域生态空间规划重视不够，其静态的、定性为主的规划方法严重滞后，存在一系列不足与缺陷：1）重城区，轻市域；2）重主观定性，轻客观定量；3）重被动落实，轻主动响应；4）重静态蓝图，轻动态模拟。其空间规划成果远不能达到预期，无法应对城市化对市域生态环境和资源所带来的影响和威胁。以宁波市域空间为对象，以市域生态空间演变为出发点，从生态空间的安全格局、结构特征和用地类型转移3个方面，通过对2000年、2010年和2018年3个时期的市域空间演变的定量化分析，揭示市域生态空间演变的特征与规律。并以此为基础探索新型市域生态空间重构的方法和内容，提出空间优化的策略：针对安全格局层面生态适宜性衰退、结构层面连通度下降、地类层面绿色空间减少的问题等，通过确定生态核心，构建绿色空间廊道，筛选关键节点，对其分别进行分级、保护，最终重新构建起良性的宁波市域生态空间体系，并针对优化结果进行评价与修正。从市域生态空间3种类型演变分析入手，以"演变-响应-重构"为逻辑指导市域生态空间规划，积极探索了应对城市化影响下市域生态空间优化的新方法，为市域山水林田湖草生命综合体的资源保护和科学利用提供了一定的理论。;Urban ecological space is the green base and ecological foundation of urban and rural development, which is synergistically linked to the ecosystems of landscape, water, forest, field, lake and grass, and is the spatial carrier of various processes of flora and fauna and natural ecology, as well as the place for human socio-economic activities, and is closely related to urban and rural economic and social development. A good urban ecological space system is an important carrier to realize the stability of the ecosystem at the municipal level, to coordinate urban development and nature protection, and also an important guarantee to realize the healthy and benign development of the city. The existing municipal ecological spatial planning does not pay enough attention to its static, qualitative-oriented planning methods, which are seriously lagging behind, with a series of deficiencies and defects:1) emphasis on urban areas rather than municipalities; 2) emphasis on subjective qualitative rather than objective quantitative; 3) emphasis on passive implementation rather than active response; 4) emphasis on static blueprints rather than dynamic simulations. Its spatial planning results are far from meeting expectations and cannot cope with the impacts and threats brought by urbanization on the ecological environment and resources of the urban area. This paper selects Ningbo urban space as the object, takes the evolution of urban ecological space as the starting point, and reveals the characteristics and laws of the evolution of urban ecological space from three aspects:security pattern, structural characteristics and land use type transfer of ecological space, through the quantitative analysis of the evolution of urban space in 2000, 2010 and 2018. Based on this, we explore the methods and contents of the new municipal ecological space reconstruction and propose strategies for spatial optimization:to address the problems of declining ecological suitability at the security pattern level, declining connectivity at the structural level, and decreasing green space at the land type level, etc., by identifying ecological cores, organizing green space corridors, screening key nodes, grading and protecting them respectively, and finally reconstructing a benign Ningbo municipal ecological Spatial system of Ningbo city is reconstructed, and the optimization results are evaluated and revised. This study starts from the analysis of the evolution of three types of urban ecological space, and uses the logic of evolution-response-reconstruction to guide the urban ecological space planning, and actively explores a new method for optimizing the urban ecological space under the influence of urbanization, which provides a certain theory for the protection and scientific utilization of resources in the urban landscape, forest, field, lake and grass life complex.

The concept of the “writer flâneur”, as developed by Walter Benjamin, sought to make sense of the seemingly chaotic nineteenth century city. While the flâneur provided a way for new urban structures to be ordered, it was also a transgressive act that involved engaging with urban spaces in new ways. In the contemporary city, where spaces are now heavily controlled and ordered, some members of the city’s socio-ecological community suffer as a result of idealistic notions of who and what belongs in the city, and how we must behave as urban citizens. Many of these ideals emerge from nineteenth century conceptions of the city in contrast to the country (Williams). However, a reimagining of the flâneur can allow for new transgressions of urban space and result in new literary imaginaries that capture the complexity of urban environments, question some of the more damaging processes and systems, offer new ways of connecting with the city, and propose alternative ways of living with the non-human in such places. With reference to the work of Debra Benita Shaw, Rob Shields and Donna Haraway, I will examine how the urban walking figure might be reimagined as cyborg, complicating boundaries between the real and imagined, the organic and inorganic, and between the human and non-human (Haraway Cyborgs). I will argue that the cyborg flâneur allows for new ways of writing and reading the urban and can work to reimagine the city as posthuman multispecies community. As one example of cyborg flânerie, I look to the app Story City to show how a writer can develop new environmental imaginaries in situ as an act of resistance against the anthropocentric ordering of the city. This article intends to begin a conversation about the ethical, political and epistemological potential of cyborg flânerie and leads to several questions which will require further research.