Ephemeral City Research Articles

Transient Transformations: Memory and Identity Lessons from Kumbh Mela

The Kumbh Mela, held every twelve years at the confluence of the Ganga and Yamuna rivers in Prayagraj, India, is the largest religious gathering and ephemeral city in the world. This article explores the physical and social dimensions of the festival, drawing parallels with other temporary architectures and paying particular attention to the role of memory. The physical structure of the city, organized into a flexible grid, accommodates millions of pilgrims while preserving spaces for the community and its collective identity. The material memory of the site, layered with historical and spiritual significance, intersects with the intangible memory carried by pilgrims through traditions and cultural practices. This blend of tangible and intangible elements fosters a sense of continuity, even in a temporary setting. By examining the Kumbh Mela, the study highlights the importance of memory in creating cohesive, resilient communities within transient urban landscapes, and offers valuable lessons for the design and planning of other temporary settlements.

Photography, composition, and the ephemeral city

AbstractPhotography is ultimately concerned with the ephemeral – with capturing and preserving transient moments. As a place in constant flux, full of ephemera and the ephemeral, the city has long been an important site for photographers. Those who study the city are increasingly incorporating photography into their research thanks to changing and more accessible technologies and epistemological shifts across the social sciences. Photographs are taking on new roles and are not only adjuncts or images that serve to illustrate or support text; they are integral to varied methodologies that centre the creation of images, from participatory methods using photo‐voice to visual urban ethnographies. This paper considers how a move from illustrative and documentary style to more creative and evocative photography is changing the ways geographers compose images. Geographers are not just taking images but making them, involving themselves in a form of hybrid geographic and artistic practice. This shift involves a move from more objective to subjective framings and, in some cases, from more passive to active techniques. Taking graffiti photography as a departure, this paper explores how a hybrid geographic and artistic approach influences the composition and aesthetic qualities of images. The paper takes the reader through five compositions emerging from a study on the politics of graffiti in Norway: 1. Documentation; 2. Obstruction; 3. Abstraction; 4. Reflection; and 5. Negation. These compositions are useful in understanding the place of graffiti, one of the most contested and quintessentially ephemeral features of the urban landscape. This analysis demonstrates how a divergence from more typical representations is important in conducting critical urban photographic research, how an artistic eye is about the analytic as well as the aesthetic.

Glancing Encounters: The Ephemeral City Archive in Eliza Haywood's Fantomina, or Love in a Maze and Frances Burney's Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress

This essay uses vignettes from two early fictions by women, Eliza Haywood's novel Fantomina, or Love in a Maze (1725) and Frances Burney's novel Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress (1782) to explore how glancing encounters produce an archive for future possibility. It suggests that putting new materialist readings of the city in conversation with affective queer theories of the archive makes visible ephemeral notes to the future in the fictions of the past, allowing us to read eighteenth-century women writers' texts not only as evidence of the real limitations of the past (and the present) but as portals to re-imagine alternative, more capacious futures.

Public space in an age of austerity

Through an overview of the decade 2008 to 2017, and looking comparatively across four northern European cities, this paper reflects on the changing nature of public space during these austerity years and on the processes of shaping public spaces. The paper draws from the experiences of London, Copenhagen, Malmo and Oslo to explore processes of the design, development, use and management of public spaces during this period. The evidence suggests that we have witnessed a period of significant innovation, side by side with major challenges to the collective approach to public spaces. This has led to distinct forms of public spaces that for good or ill have multiplied as a result of the trends discussed in the paper, spaces of; expectation; the private/public sphere; spectacle; respite; infrastructure; diversion; income generation; security; the ephemeral city; community control; occupation; disadvantage; and decline. Episodes of changing practice are set out in the paper and cumulatively reveal distinct and significant changes during the austerity era, although not necessarily in the manner that might have been expected. Instead, in these four cities, the impact of austerity seems to have been eclipsed by other evolving and competing public policy goals, and by the evolving range of public space types.

Micrometeorology of an ephemeral desert city, the Burning Man experiment

Observations are presented from a 12-day micrometeorological experiment investigating impacts of an ephemeral city (Black Rock City, Nevada, population 70,000), which emerges each year on a flat, arid, vegetation-free playa in late summer for the week-long ‘Burning Man’ event. Analysis focuses on observations from a 28m tower deployed in the center of the city prior to, and throughout the event. Wind profiles show a reduction in wind speed, particularly below 5m and indicate an increase in roughness length. Surface radiation and energy fluxes were remarkably unchanged after the development of the city. Both cases resembled other arid surfaces and somewhat other urban surfaces, though with little anthropogenic and much less heat storage flux than traditional cities. CO2 fluxes increased rapidly from 5.2gCm−2d−1 on the first full day of measurement to 24.8 during the event and peaked during the exodus (33.3gCm−2d−1). Inventory modeling revealed sources were mostly stationary, especially on-site electricity generation for air conditioning units. The car-free nature of the main event reduced the mobile sources to less than metabolic sources from the population itself and the CO2 flux per capita was three times smaller than on arrival and exodus days.

The Art of Public Space: curating and re-imagining the ephemeral city by K. Gurney

The Art of Public Space: curating and re-imagining the ephemeral city by K. Gurney

Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice, by Rosa Salzberg

Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice, by Rosa Salzberg

Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral city. Cheap print and urban culture in Renaissance Venice, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014

Rosa Salzberg, Ephemeral city. Cheap print and urban culture in Renaissance Venice, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2014

Review of 'Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice'

Review of 'Ephemeral City: Cheap Print and Urban Culture in Renaissance Venice'

The Caseta and the Interior in Seville's Ephemeral City

ABSTRACTFor one week every April, the Andalusian city of Seville shifts its activity from the commercial hub of the historic center for the annual festivities of the spring fair, Feria de Abril. The Feria sees a 100-hectare dusty plateau near the Guadalquivir River transform into an ephemeral, tent-like city of lanterns, light bulbs, and candy-striped tarpaulins. Over 1,000 privately controlled temporary structures–casetas–form the blocks and street of the festive city's urban layout. The party town is erected, enacted, and demounted in just over a week; part of an annual cycle of expectation, becoming, and nostalgia. The sole programmatic function of the interior of the caseta is to support the convivial acts of socializing, eating, drinking, and dancing: forging new social networks and simultaneously reinforcing established hierarchies of class, status, and family. While the exterior appearance of the casetas is controlled by strict aesthetic guidelines imposed by the city council, the interior reflects a varied interpretation of the caseta typology, merging and inverting interior and exterior, profane and sacred. The interiors make manifest and celebrate the agricultural origins of the fair and the contradictions inherent within the city/country sophisticated/rustic encounter: rich damasks, velvets and lace, gilt mirrors contrasted with folkloric-inspired rush mat furniture, paper lanterns, and carnations. The ephemeral ludic city mirrors the urban and social constructs of the “permanent” city on the other side of the river; here, however, the festive interior of the caseta permits a greater degree of porosity and social mobility than could ever be possible between the thick masonry walls of the noble palaces and the concrete blocks of the housing estates. Ephemeral constructions, spatial inversion, and displacement executed within the controlled liminal contexts of festivities have long been a tradition of Andalusian culture, reaching their artistic zenith during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through an analysis of the development of the caseta's interior from its origins as a replication of a domestic reception room to the contemporary state of hyper-baroque party hall, it will be argued that the interior of the caseta acts as symbolic and programmatic motor of the festive construction of space within the ephemeral city of the Feria.

Metropolitan (Im)migrants in the "Lettered City"

In her article Metropolitan (Im)migrants in the 'Lettered City' Stacey Balkan employs Angel Rama's discussion of audience as a means of analyzing a Latin American diaspora that exists beyond the rational periphery of the state. Herein, the term diaspora is redefined as a translocal phenomenon wherein the metropolitan (im)migrant moves from rural margin to urban center. Normative definitions of exile — persons displaced from autonomous nation-states — are likewise scrutinized in the context of what Balkan terms a post-contemporary city of letters. This postcontemporary city is the subject of what Mabel Morana refers to as a subaltern boom — that is, the McOndo generation. Balkan discusses the work of Roberto Bolano, Daniel Alarcon, and Junot Diaz who employ such narrative signatures as invisibility to reify the ephemeral (or lettered) city while also amplifying the predicament of the now urban Indian living within its borders. Stacey Balkan, Metropolitan (Im)migrants in the 'Lettered City' page 2 of 10 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 14.5 (2012): Special issue New Work about the Journey and Its Portrayals. Ed. I-Chun Wang

Ephemeral City: Design and Civic Meaning at the 1904 World's Fair

Ephemeral City: Design and Civic Meaning at the 1904 World's Fair

Welcome to Black Rock City: Ephemeral Homes, Built Environments, and Participatory Negotiations

By applying Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and doxa, this paper explores how Burning Man participants negotiate ideological and pragmatic limitations in transforming a vast desert landscape into an urban physical and social space. The ephemeral city serves as a model for radical self-expression with an internal society that creates an engaging participatory experience among differing and sometimes conflicting social institutions. Black Rock City LLC, committed to democratically and collaboratively engaging with festival participants in the production of space, demonstrates a realistic possibility for successful negotiation of pragmatics and ideologies while still allowing ample room to foster freedom and community. In examining these dynamic negotiations and their resultant influences on the physical landscape through varied lenses, this article suggests how Black Rock City might be a portable adaptation for other spaces of insurgency.

Preface

Preface Michael C. Jordan Political, social, and cultural developments in recent years have imparted a new sense of urgency to reflections on the changing relationship between faith and culture throughout the world. Those reflections at one stage focused on speculations concerning how culture would be reshaped when its religious foundations had been repudiated and eradicated. But in recent years we find terms such as "the death of the death of God" used in a book title by Jacob Neusner and "desecularization" in a book title by Peter Berger, and the questions in the foreground now pertain to the proper relationship between faith and cultural-political life in the face of the persistence of religious belief. The current state of such questions is anticipated aptly in a pair of lectures given by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1978: "The End of Christendom," and "But Not of Christ."1 Muggeridge offers a personal witness to the efforts in the twentieth century to destroy Christianity especially in the Soviet Union and presciently reports that those efforts in the Soviet Union had failed—and this before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the success of Solidarity in Poland, and the implosion of the Soviet regime and empire. It is not coincidental to the account given in these lectures that Muggeridge himself converted to Christianity and just a few years after delivering these lectures became a Catholic. [End Page 5] The end of Christendom in Muggeridge's terms indicates the collapse of a civilization in which Christianity is deeply entwined in the political, social, and cultural structures of power. He sees in the twentieth century a parallel to what St. Augustine encountered when faced with the collapse of Rome: the inevitable transience of historical civilizations in contrast to which the eternity that comes to light through Christianity shines out all the more clearly, as he envisions anew Augustine's distinction between the ephemeral City of Man and the everlasting City of God. Muggeridge in these essays offers witness to what he understands to be a great historical period of transition, and his reminder in the lectures that he speaks as a journalist and not as a scholar seems apt. His account imparts a personal character to the movement of history especially as he reports what he has witnessed of the failed effort in the Soviet Union to destroy Christianity and of the resurgence of Christian truth through the great figure of Solzhenitsyn as well as through his sense of moral and cultural decline in the West. To his credit, Muggeridge in the second essay, "But Not [the End] of Christ," recognizes the danger of egoism involved in crafting denunciations of the culture around him and applies self-restraint as he falls back upon the hope that flows from his own deeply held Christian faith. Muggeridge can be viewed in these lectures as establishing the ground for a new set of challenges that he himself does not fully address—at one moment he movingly speaks of himself as living in the vicinity of death (although he lived for another twelve years after delivering these lectures), and while he knows that Christ and Christianity will live on beyond what he sees as the end of Christendom, he does not ask what new relationships between Christianity and political and cultural life might emerge in a new historical period. Perhaps Muggeridge was not well prepared for such questions because in these lectures he focuses on Christ and on great Christian thinkers and artists such as Newman and Dostoevsky but does not bring into focus Christ's presence in the world through the Christian church. In any case, one measure of historical development [End Page 6] in the three decades since Muggeridge delivered these lectures is that new questions about how Christianity should participate in contemporary public and cultural affairs are being thoughtfully and energetically pursued. Among the many important initiatives in this area—and of course the Institute on Religion and Public Life and its journal, First Things, must be lauded in this context—is a new organization called "Theos: A Public Theology Think Tank," launched in November 2006 with the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and Cardinal...

Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houston

Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houston

Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houston (review)

Ephemeral City: Cite Looks at Houston (review)

España: temas de cultura y civilización (review)

266 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies thereof), a gargantuan highway network, rhe suburbs it has spawned, and halting efforts to reclaim the urban center. Part II, "Places of the City," explores Houston through detailed and grounded accounts of the city's prominenr and hidden locales—boulevards and housing projects, municipal parks and immigrant enclaves —and what they say about the city and American urban life in late twentieth century. In part III, "Buildings of the City," the focus is architectural, how Houston's economic booms, loose planning, and daring design make rhe city a place astounding to its critics in ways both positive and negative. Contributors chronicle the rise and rise again of the Houston skyscraper , rhe city's changing housing, the aging modernity of the Astrodome, and the postmodernity of Conoco's new corporate headquarters . Luckily, the editors chose to append updates to these essays—some twenty years old— rather than revise them, leaving these dispatches intact and redolent of the 1980s and 1990s Houston from which they emerged. The result is a compelling, aggregate portrait of city making in its time and place. Three audiences will find rhis book appealing , each more general than the last. First is the aficionado of Houston and urbanism in Texas, for which this book's specificity is miracle. Second is the reader interested in late twentieth century Sunbelt city, tired of hearing about die post-industrial Northeastern U.S. or the disaster-prone California metropolis, for which this account of a city in the middle will be refreshing. This book will speak to inhabitants of similar cities not so lucky to have a corps of such skilled and prolific observers. This brings up the third, and most generalized, audience . Getting a handle on our jealousy, we may find it inspirational to hold in hand a book so devoted to the ongoing critical engagement with just one city, a forum outside local media boosterism or academic jargon where thoughtful commentary can be aired in clear English prose. For criticisms of this book, please hold a mirror up to my comments above. This is a highly specific and place-bound kind of book, which assumes you think Houston is interesting and has something to teach us. Because Cite is specifically pitched as critical commentary and not theoretical analysis, the reader must often draw out broader lessons and be willing to extrapolate from this city's experience. These essays remain dispatches more rhan case studies , since there is no conceptual framework being developed or grounded in the particular. If you are contented with Houston's specificity , or willing to do some analytical work of your own, this may be your book. If not... One may, in the end, like Houston less after reading this book than before. But Ephemeral City makes the contribution of looking carefully and without undue prejudice at sprawling metropolis that increasingly defines urban life. Houston may be, as in the words of the editors, "a wild, confusing place." But such cities more of motion than fixity may be our urban future. This book reminds us that paying attention, getting it down on paper, and debating it is not only necessary, but also possible. Why can't it be like this more often? David L. Prytherch The Miami University España: temas de cultura y civilización Heinle, 2003 By Luisa Piemontese-Ramos and Carlos Arboleda A Spanish civilization and culture text for American undergraduates is difficult to write. No particular approach will appeal to all audiences whether it is organized thematically, historically , politically, geographically, etc. España: temas de cultura y civilización will not satisfy all readers, either. This textbook is directed at intermediate -advanced learners and is organized geographically, devoting each chapter to a particular Spanish autonomous community, though some chapters focus on two regions. The only difference widi regard to that organization is Chapter 1, "España y la Comunidad Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 267 Europea" and the final chapter, "España en el mundo." It needs to be stated from the outset that this text does not follow a historical pattern as many other civilization texts do. The textbook does include a rather short...

A Logic of Expressive Choice. By Alexander A. Schuessler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. 177p. $49.50 cloth, $16.95 paper.

An interesting aspect of life at Duke is the annual construction of our local Brigadoon. The well-ordered but ephemeral tent city is named “Krzyzewskiville,” after Duke's head basketball coach. K-ville appears once a year in the weeks before the game against UNC-Chapel Hill, our arch rival. So many students want to see this game that an elaborate nonprice rationing scheme, based on a queue, has evolved to allocate tickets. “Tenting” students may have to wait two weeks or more to get tickets. The game is in January or early February, so they sleeping outside and try to keep up with their school work despite rain, snow, and subfreezing temperatures at night. Random checks (even in the middle of the night) are conducted by student representatives; if a tent is empty too often it is taken down, and the residents lose their place in the queue.

The Magdalena Bubble

Many so dote upon this bubble world Whose colors in a moment break and fly. -Tennyson Nebulous colonization schemes by enterprising financiers have frequently been floated but few of them have attained the heights of the Magdalena Bubble. Instigated and engineered by the Lower California Company in 1866, it was destined to play a significant part in Lower California colonization ventures. The nucleus for its operations was Magdalena Bay with its ephemeral city of Cortez. The company's grant bounded by the Pacific and the Gulf and extending from the