Experience Of Urban Space Research Articles

Valued Lives in Violent Places: Black Urban Placemaking at a Civil Rights Memorial in New Orleans

AbstractThis article explores the history, use, and significance of a civil rights memorial to Martin Luther King Jr, located in the Central City neighborhood of New Orleans. Situating this memorial as an important site for black urban placemaking, I focus on a religious vigil against urban violence that was held there in late 2008. Using historical and ethnographic data, I demonstrate how participants in the vigil claim and inhabit the memorial in order to raise awareness about the impact of violence, while simultaneously asserting the social value of black people and communities. I argue that this action unfolds with particular urgency in the post‐Katrina period, to counter the perceived devaluation, criminalization, and social exclusion of black people. Participants in the vigil thus rework spatial, social, and symbolic boundaries to shift relatedness and to ensure survival and social membership. The article goes beyond traditionally territorialized understandings of place and placemaking to demonstrate how the actions, interactions, and moral frameworks emerging at this particular place are part of a larger black geography and spatial imaginary, one with the capacity to transform the conceptualization and experience of urban space, place, and community.

Urban Photography/Cultural Geography: Spaces, Objects, Events

AbstractImage‐making is bound up in our experience of urban space. In artistic and academic practice, contemporary urban photography has critically reworked street photography traditions, embracing its energy and spontaneity, while inviting a more dialogic and reflexive approach. Although the use of urban photography has been somewhat limited in cultural geography research, the practice has enormous potential to complement and enhance contemporary enquiries in the field – particularly those that highlight feelings, experience, and textures of place and draw from more‐than‐representational approaches. A return to making urban photos also chimes with the current approaches that incorporate creative practice and performative methodologies to introduce uncertainty into research. Here, I consider what cultural geographers might gain by exploring city spaces, objects, and events through the lens. I focus not on the images themselves, but on the practice of doing urban photography and on what these images may do for research. In particular, photography may help evoke the feeling of place and its material richness. By focusing on urban microgeographies and by opening work to ambiguity and chance, geographers may create new space for interpretation. Attending to material with the camera also enables us to play with value and hierarchy and provokes the animation and agency of matter. Finally, as well as highlighting the matter of things, images can capture the matter of our own bodies caught up in events with the cities we inhabit. Urban photography offers a way of doing research that opens up city spaces, objects, and events, so we can better reflect on the complex textures, feelings, and experiences of urban space.

Religious experiences of stasis and mobility in contemporary Europe: undocumented Pentecostal Brazilians in Amsterdam and Barcelona

Discussions related to contemporary religious diversity in urban contexts often presume that people who form part of the public life of cities are citizens or have the right to move and dwell in the city. This article reminds us that when asking how certain religious movements become public in European cities, we also need to ask how possibilities of becoming public are tied to exclusionary citizenship regimes. By way of research among undocumented Brazilian migrants who attend Pentecostal churches, this article argues that contemporary European transformations of citizenship regimes influence religious perceptions of dwelling and movement within Europe and current experiences of urban space. The opportunities for undocumented Brazilians that allow them to move or to stay somewhere are dependent on legislation, the functioning of state institutions, the family's origins, and on contingency. In the experience of Brazilian Pentecostal adherents, acquiring legal status, to dwell or to be able to remain mobile within this assemblage of processes is dependent on their relationship with God. This article contributes to discussions in mobility studies and the geography of religion that highlight the need for more attention on mobility and stasis in relation to state actors.

Local Search Applications and Urban Public Space

Applications based on user-contributed geographic information are expected to re-organise the users' everyday dealings with urban space. This article presents findings from an exploratory study about users of the Austrian local search portal Where2be for students. The study applies an analytical framework to reconstruct the interdependencies of local search applications with the users' experience of urban space. Results indicate that Where2be empowers the marginalized student community for tangible appropriations of public space as a stage for identification. As the experience of the city is shaped by fragmentation, dissolution and restructuring of spatial boundaries, Where2be supports new forms of communal relationships by linking people and places. While Where2be is utilized to conceive attached symbolic meanings of businesses, the relevance of distance-driven locational factors, like visibility, might be softened in favour of findability on local search platforms. Results add to groundwork for future research hypotheses, and implications for urban socio-spatial development.

The Poetics of Cartography and Habitation: Home as a Repository of Memories

This article brings Proust and Bachelard into conversation about inhabiting the home and the role that remembrance, memory and the imagination might play in producing knowledge about the world. Proust and Bachelard both suggest that once a material object, such as a house, has been seized upon by the imagination by those who inhabit the dwelling, it no longer makes sense to assess the space-of-home using “objective” or “mathematical” modalities. Proust’s novel has particular relevance in suggesting how we might think about how the material objects of the home serve as the repository for memories. The aim is to investigate the tension between the experience of urban space and its representations to make cognizant and explicit the use of mathematically informed signs. I suggest that the material features of the urban landscape and home itself hold memories that should be viewed as significant artifacts that constitute how we understand the world. I argue that the formation of the self is constituted through our relations with both imaginary and material objects. This position challenges a concept of the home whereby habitation and imagination are constructed as subordinate to the mathematical measurements of the material world.

IPod use: an urban aesthetics of sonic ubiquity

This paper explores the creation of an urban sonic aesthetic through a critical analysis of Apple iPod use. Based on original ethnographic material, the chapter explores the differing ways in which urban space is mediated through communication technologies like the iPod. It divides the experience of urban space into ‘Fordist’ and ‘Hyper-post-Fordist’ aesthetics and strategies. It situates these aesthetic ‘moments’ within a critical analysis informed by the work of a range of urban and critical theorists.

Urban experience takes an informational turn: mobile internet usage and the unevenness of geosocial activity

Coinciding the widespread deployment of handheld information and communications technologies (ICT) there has been a rapid emergence of mobile Internet applications. Notably, these applications are designed to perform within operating systems that are not only Internet-connected but that are also location-aware and decoupled from any single point in space—design characteristics that enable instantaneous integration of users’ everyday ‘real-world’ experience with an array of Internet-based services. As a consequence, the experience of urban space can be mediated by digital information in ways that have not before been possible. In this article I explore the convergence of ongoing discussions about the digital divide, the nascent class of mobile ICT, and the urban communities that have been most adversely impacted by uneven technological landscapes. Building on this convergence, I argue that it is increasingly important to consider the impacts that pervasive mobile information have on the composition of everyday urban life.

Altered States: Social Networks, Digital Ecologies and Affecting Change in the Urban Landscape

Network structures have rapidly evolved to form the organizational model of socio-cultural exchange and technological development in the digital age. Indeed, such transformation has radically altered the way in which we connect and relate to each other through mobile technologies and social interfaces. Surrounding this transition, in both temporal and spatial terms, is the shift in our understanding of both the composition and content of what we might call ‘the city’. The omnipresent, seemingly boundless, influence of ‘network culture’ has led to a transfer in our attitude and position to them; as van ’t Hof et al. (2011) have suggested “we go from being on the net to being in the net.” What does this mean for the city? There has been an inclination within contemporary critical theory and literature on the subject to assume that such technologies have surpassed the capability of the urban realm and that architecture is unable to sustain its position in this regard. It is perhaps therefore useful to consider two variant models of engaging with the city: the ‘physical experience of urban space’ and ‘digital social connectivity’. These integrative elements of our relationship with urban conditions are not, however, fully combinative or inclusive in a manner with which they can coalesce and involve people across a significant and representative section of society. This directs us towards an important set of agents within the city – the urban collective i.e. the citizens and their numerous communities, groups and shared resources, ideals and features. This paper therefore proposes a framework for affecting change in the urban landscape through notions of spatial justice, governance, and communities in relation to physical place and digital identity.

Cidade and bairro: classification, constitution and experience of urban space in Angola

Like other towns that are the product of a colonial history, Angolan towns are usually described in dualist terms that refer to, on the one hand, a ‘centre’ and, on the other, a ‘periphery’. This dualist description of Angolan urban space is expressed in the case of Luanda through the terms of baixa and musseque and in the case of Benguela through cidade and bairro. Even if Angolan towns are in reality more complex and heterogeneous than what this conceptual duality portrays, these terms are widely employed and their use strongly entrenched in Angolan society. Looking at the case of Benguela, this article explores the usage of the duality bairro and cidade and argues, following Bourdieu, that these terms function as classificatory categories with strong symbolic power, through which cidade is associated with the urban, order and the ‘proper place’, and bairro with the sub-urban, disorder and chaos. The article further argues that the symbolic power of cidade is predicated on historical, social, economic, cultural and political relationships with ‘development’.

Residential Sampling and Johannesburg's Forced Migrants

This study examines a residential sampling technique that was used to survey refugees in inner-city Johannesburg. The survey's sampling framework assumed that, once displaced populations had settled, they could be a) adequately categorized according to residential sampling ‘frames’; and b) readily accessed in their homes. The paper explores the theoretical and practical limits of these assumptions. It shows how the particularly volatile relationship between respondents and the urban landscape made it difficult to generate a representative sample. The paper uses these findings to call for sampling procedures that are better suited to forced migrants’ experiences of urban space.

“Where We Stayed was very Bad …”: Migrant Children's Perspectives on Life in Informal Rented Accommodation in Two Southern African Cities

Most research and initiatives relating to children's experiences of urban space have focused on the physical environment. Housing policies in Third World countries have also emphasised the provision of physical infrastructure and buildings, and urban aesthetics. In this paper the authors draw on the voices of young informants from Maseru (Lesotho), and Blantyre (Malawi), who, in discussions concerning moving house, chose to talk about social and economic aspects of life in the informal sector rented accommodation that is increasingly characteristic of these and many other African cities. The children offer insight into the peopling of urban space, mapping unruly environments characterised by disorder, gossip, and social contestation, far removed from the hard technocratic spaces imagined by planners. Their observations are important not only because children represent a very large and relatively neglected proportion of African urban dwellers but also because they offer a unique insight into the dynamic character of urban environments. As close observers of adult decisionmaking processes, children are informed commentators on motivations for moving house as well as the impacts of urban environments on their own lives. Not only do the children highlight the inadequacies of the informal private rental sector but they also offer a window onto why it is inadequate.

Going Places: Women Artists in Central London in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Middle-class women's experience of urban space has become the focus of a number of recent studies. Re-mapping the sexual geographies of the British capital, this essay shifts attention away from masculine strollers, feminine streetwalkers and leisured women, to focus on women artists who lived and worked in central London in the 1850s and 1860s. Wanting to succeed, or at least participate, in their chosen profession, women artists strategically positioned themselves at the centre of the nation's art world. And in pursuing this profession, they moved in and across central London, going to study and research, buy materials, visit exhibitions, and network with colleagues. The essay considers the re-organisation of domestic space and creation of a 'counter-tactics' of the habitat; the artistic neighbourhood of Fitzrovia; walking and wandering in the urban environment to sample its transitory delights and unexpected pleasures; a 'spatiality of dissent' with the founding of a women's centre; and a raft of images of middle-class women walkers and travellers in relation to the visual mapping of London during a period of expansion, change and colliding representation. Drawing on the writings of Elizabeth Grosz and Beatriz Colomina, the essay concludes with a discussion of the relations between city space and corporeality, visuality and obscenity centred on an analysis of Emily Mary Osborn's painting, Nameless and Friendless, which portrays a woman artist in an art dealer's shop in London's West End.

Going Places: Women Artists in Central London in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Middle-class women's experience of urban space has become the focus of a number of recent studies. Re-mapping the sexual geographies of the British capital, this essay shifts attention away from masculine strollers, feminine streetwalkers and leisured women, to focus on women artists who lived and worked in central London in the 1850s and 1860s. Wanting to succeed, or at least participate, in their chosen profession, women artists strategically positioned themselves at the centre of the nation's art world. And in pursuing this profession, they moved in and across central London, going to study and research, buy materials, visit exhibitions, and network with colleagues. The essay considers the re-organisation of domestic space and creation of a 'counter-tactics' of the habitat; the artistic neighbourhood of Fitzrovia; walking and wandering in the urban environment to sample its transitory delights and unexpected pleasures; a 'spatiality of dissent' with the founding of a women's centre; and a raft of images of middle-class women walkers and travellers in relation to the visual mapping of London during a period of expansion, change and colliding representation. Drawing on the writings of Elizabeth Grosz and Beatriz Colomina, the essay concludes with a discussion of the relations between city space and corporeality, visuality and obscenity centred on an analysis of Emily Mary Osborn's painting, Nameless and Friendless, which portrays a woman artist in an art dealer's shop in London's West End.

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England

Visuality and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century England