Open City Research Articles

Sensi dell’organizzazione testuale interna in Ap 21,12-14

The purpose of this study is to explore the sense of unity and internal organization in Ap 21,12-14 as basis for a right interpretation. After establishing the authentic text through textual criticism, the analysis focuses to the internal organization of Ap 21,12-14, which can be the synthesis of the main aspects visible on the external side of the New Jerusalem: the wall, the 12 gates and the 12 foundations. The construction method of the biblical passage Ap 21,12-14 could reflect a rhetorical intention. The 12 gates, the 12 foundations and the surrounding wall with the following descriptions are indications of a secure, universal and open city that fascinates the faithful. At the same time, the internal organization of the text indicates aspects of the writing style, symbols and imagery used by the author. Article history: Received 10.11.2024; Revised 01.11.2024; Accepted 11.11.2024. Available online: 11.01.2025; Available print: 30.01.2025.

Study on Influencing Factors of Tourism Income in Yantai City Based on Multiple Linear Regression Analysis

As one of the first coastal open cities in China, Yantai City is situated in the eastern Shandong Peninsula, bordered by the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea. With the continuous improvement of tourism infrastructure, public enthusiasm for tourism in Yantai has been growing. To formulate more effective tourism development policies tailored to the local context, this study examines Yantai City using a multiple linear regression model to identify the primary factors influencing domestic tourism income. Based on the findings, this paper proposes scientifically grounded and actionable strategies to further optimize the development of tourism in Yantai City.

Cultural hybridity and the black diaspora: Representations in contemporary African and African-American narratives

Cultural hybridity stands as a defining characteristic of Black diasporic literature, reflecting the intricate blending of African and Western traditions in the lived experiences of African and African-American communities. This study examines the representation of cultural hybridity in contemporary African and African-American narratives, with a particular focus on its role in shaping complex Black identities. By analyzing novels such as Teju Cole's Open City and Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, the paper explores how literature navigates the tensions between ancestral heritage and modernity, community and individuality, and belonging and alienation. Teju Cole’s Open City presents a protagonist grappling with the layered nuances of identity, tracing the intersections of race, class, and global migration. In contrast, Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing explores generational trauma and cultural continuity, connecting African roots to the fragmented histories of descendants scattered across the diaspora. These works highlight how hybridity serves not only as a site of conflict but also as a source of strength and renewal, enabling characters to embrace multifaceted identities. Through themes such as dual identities, displacement, and cultural negotiation, this paper reveals how Black diasporic literature serves as a lens to explore the fluidity of identity. The study argues that cultural hybridity is not merely a consequence of colonialism or migration but an evolving force that redefines what it means to be African or African-American in a globalized world. Ultimately, these narratives challenge rigid notions of identity, offering a rich tapestry of voices that affirm the resilience and creativity of the Black diaspora.

Literary form and historicised relationality: theorising the city as text in Teju Cole’s novels

ABSTRACT This essay explores the representation and theorisation of the city in Teju Cole’s novels – Every Day Is for the Thief (2007), Open City (2011), and Tremor (2023). It argues that Cole’s writing articulates a new grammar of city-ness premised on historicised relationality and comparative thinking, thus challenging paradigms of urban representation that universalise the Western city. In particular, I propose that Cole’s novels offer a rewriting of Lagos and New York as specifically textual constructions, in which histories of modernity and colonisation get crystallised into their social geographies and cultural infrastructures. By close reading these texts and by drawing from the insights of postcolonial and literary urban studies, I analyse the formal devices – from variations in perspective to restricted focalisation – that Cole employs to textualise the city and its political histories. Through form, Cole’s novels raise crucial questions, both ethical and narrative, about representability, language, and historical violence in urban settings.

“I Was in No Mood for People Who Tried to Lay Claims on Me”: Community, Hospitality, and Friendship in Teju Cole’s Open City

This article examines community, friendship, and hospitality in Teju Cole’s novel Open City, drawing on Nancy’s The Inoperative Community, Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community, and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship and Of Hospitality. I aim to show how the representation of migratory experiences in this novel revolves around the contrast between operative communities based on immanence, fusion, and essentialist concepts such as race and ethnicity, and inoperative and elective communities characterized by openness and exposure to alterity. I examine how friendship and hospitality prove to be the necessary force in the novel to transform New York and Brussels into truly “open cities” hospitable to people of different races.

열린 메타버스 도시의 윤리 : ‘메타버스 스마트’ - 리처드 세넷의 『짓기와 거주하기』를 중심으로

All forms of cities are inherently in conflict between construction and residence, and in that the metaverse takes all elements in an open form in the process of transcending the actual city, the virtual city is a reflection of the ‘ethics of the open city’ advocated by Richard Sennett. A city is composed of a ‘ville’ as a physical place and a ‘cité’ as a mental place, and an open ville is important for residents to actively intervene in the city. Through open practices in an open city, residents evolve into ‘street smarts.’ The metaverse city is also composed of a ville and a city, but unlike a real city, it is characterized by having a ville that can change flexibly. ‘Vehicles (mobility)’ that help with open practices such as walking and squinting, and ‘role play’ through titles or occupations help metaverse users explore a variety of lives in the virtual city. Just like street smarts are residents who show competence in real cities, those who build their own knowledge system based on their experience and accumulation of metaverse cities and endlessly differentiate themselves in virtual life can be called 'metaverse smarts'. Metaverse Smarts is created by the interdependent relationship between individual non-linearity and social commons.

Temporary temporariness? The (mis)use of tactical urbanism from the ‘open city’ framework

Temporary temporariness? The (mis)use of tactical urbanism from the ‘open city’ framework

Digital methods for assessing the quality of the urban environment

The article considers various methods for assessing the quality of the urban environment, their content, identifies strengths and weaknesses. In addition, the main users of these methods, who is the target audience, who the data is intended for and the possibility of making management decisions based on this data were identified. The article also presents a methodology developed by the authors that allows assessing the quality of urban areas by five main parameters using digital methods based on open city data. This will allow obtaining an objective picture of the state of the urban space and making adequate management decisions. This work is based on an integrated approach to assessing urbanized space, developing universal assessment models that allow correlating different-quality characteristics of city subsystems into a single assessment system, which will allow obtaining a quantitative assessment of the state of spatial indicators of the city. Digital methods of managing the life cycle of urban development systems imply entering a new stage of forecasting, programming and modeling the development of urbanized systems, eliminating serious consequences of urban development errors with large budget losses when implementing poor-quality development scenarios. The priority task of reforming the public authority system is to create a qualitatively new level of public administration efficiency, including in matters of spatial development of territories. The development of a methodological basis for modeling spatial development processes lays the foundation for creating new technological tools, developing digital platforms for spatial modeling of territorial systems development based on a big data system. As a result of the study, the main criteria and indicators of environmental quality were developed. The criteria matrix includes such evaluation blocks as transport and mobility; functionality of space; safety of space; accessibility; improvement of the environment. The evaluation criteria were tested in the Shaksha residential area and refined during a field survey of the city territory.

Political Push Factors of African-Western Migration as Depicted in Selected African Novels

This article looks at political factors in African countries that are pushing Africans to move to Western countries in search of greener pastures, as they are demonstrated in African novels. The novels to be considered for this discourse are Dirie and Miller’s Desert Flower, Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Cole’s Open City. While the discussion is on political issues pushing Africans to Western countries, when and where necessary, reference will be made to emigration to other countries, even within the Africa continent as well. The concepts of push factors, politics and African-Western migration are defined as part of the introductory section of this discourse. The subheadings of this discourse are introduction, analysis, and conclusion.

Subaltern Politics at Urban Borderlands

Cities around the world are developed through modern/colonial boundaries between the formal/informal, private/public, vehicular/pedestrian, secular/religious, human/nonhuman, or new/old. Postcolonial and decolonial theorists have demonstrated how borders have served the colonial control of the city through the state apparatus, where differences have reinforced inequalities rather than engendering an open city. While politics between the two sides of the border is often explored, this article draws attention to the rather underacknowledged role of material assemblages at urban borderlands in making room for subaltern agencies to come into being. To do so, I first demonstrate the bordering effects of modern planning practices through an example of real-estate advertisements. Later, I focus on four urban borderlands, namely walls, <em>mandals </em>(socio-religious organisations), hillslopes and rivulet banks, and alleyways. Through ethnographic research on two slum rehabilitation projects in Pune, India, I show that the spatiality and temporality produced by these borderlands transcend modern boundaries while making room for subaltern agencies. Walls are used for bending the fixed spatiality of modern apartment buildings; <em>mandals </em>engender a spatiotemporal structure that straddles the religious/secular boundary; hillslopes and rivulet banks support the permanent temporariness of the self-built neighbourhoods; and alleyways allow the public and the private to flow into one another. Here, subaltern agencies effectively transgress modern borders, not by rejecting them but by inhabiting them to make an alternative and open city possible. In effect, this article argues that urban borderlands make visible subaltern agencies that have the potential to dislodge urban theory and practice from their colonial modernist legacy.

Entanglements of race and migration in the (open) city: Analytical and normative tensions of the sociological imagination

This article considers the interface of taxonomies of race and migration crystallised through the materialities of the contemporary city in the shadow of the 7th anniversary of the Grenfell Tower fire. It draws on multi-method empirical research that interrogates the notion of the open city. The article proposes that ‘entanglement’ and ‘contaminations’ of material and cultural formations confound some claims made in the name of the good city, recognising what Marilyn Strathern might describe as the recursive ‘contamination’ of normative and empirical evidence. The article argues that it is imperative to excavate the normative domain of the empirical, and curate the empirical realisation of the normative, in rethinking a truly global sociological imagination. It concludes by suggesting that one way of approaching this is through a more forensic understanding of what is taken as ‘evidence’ in social sciences that should inform an interdisciplinary urban studies.

Amereida: An Ever-Expanding Archive

The journey of Amereida and the poem Amereida can be read as a project of poetic refoundation of the American continent, which is the foundation of the Open City. They also form the basis of an aesthetic, political and formative project in full force and originate an extensive archive. This article analyzes different dimensions of Amereida in relation to a vast archive of writings, images, displacements and supports in intermediate formats. From this perspective, it is proposed that Amereida exceeds the idea of the archive associated with the preservation of memory to expose a performative condition (Taylor) integrated to the utopian dimension (Groys) with an open character that is projected to the present day. Following these orientations, this article analyzes displacement and travel writing as an archive-repertoire with a performative and digital character. Likewise, the poem Amereida is interpreted as a poetics that reactivates the archive of Latin American literature, at the same time that it elaborates a new literary and visual cartography of the continent. Finally, it addresses the utopian impulse of the foundation of the Open City, from which new media archives derive from gender perspectives. The integration of these dimensions projects the actuality of Amereida and its power to shape an expanding archive.

Baghdad Kept on Working: Painting and Propaganda during the British Occupation of Iraq, 1941–45

This article explores the late-colonial context for a wartime encounter between Polish and Iraqi artists during a period of British military reoccupation, 1941–45. Linking E. L. T. Mesens’s propaganda work for the Allied cause to the activities of Polish painters stationed in Baghdad, particularly Józef Czapski (1896–93) and Józef Jarema (1900–1974), and to those of Iraqi artists Jewad Selim (1919–1961) and Jamil Hamoudi (1924–2003), it demonstrates how a consortium of artists and officers came to model a version of modern art construed as free inquiry into form, or “art alone.” Polish artists mobilized propagandistic narratives about threats to civilization, including the loss of Paris as an open city. Responses by Iraqi artists both reflect and refract the Allied version of civilizational values. As such, the Polish-Iraqi encounter represents an early, not-yet-postwar reckoning with doubts about the progression of artistic practice in a world in which barbarous violence was always imminent.

ISOLATED IN THE BIG CITY: (RE)FORMING THE IDENTITY OF THE PROTAGONIST-FLÂNEUR IN TEJU COLE’S OPEN CITY AND SRĐAN VALJAREVIĆ’S PEOPLE AT THE TABLE

The goal of this paper is to establish a connection between the ways identity is formed in the novels Open City by Nigerian-American author Teju Cole and People at the Table by Serbian author Srđan Valjarević. The protagonists of the aforementioned novels are immigrants who have found themselves in the isolated and urban space of the metropolis and are now trying to establish their place within it. We shall explore Charles Baudelaire’s notion of the flȃneur in an urban environment that greatly differs from the narrators’ previous homes. A reconfiguration of identity is necessary and this is accomplished through walking – an unconscious search for identity and its roots. We may ask ourselves: Is the city a constitutive element of the subject, or is the subject a social product of the city? The streets of New York and Amsterdam present the protagonists with opportunities to think about not only their current positions but their pasts. Confused and dissatisfied, they move within the big city searching for ways to accept their fates. A common element of both novels is the continual reflection of the past and social positions. The city forms the protagonists’ identities to the point that it creates a sense of disorientation and helplessness, thus destroying them. Walking is the most significant aspect of both novels, as only in movement can the identity of these flȃneurs come to light.

Pina's Pregnancy, Traumatic Realism, and the After-Life of Open City

Pina's Pregnancy, Traumatic Realism, and the After-Life of <i>Open City</i>

Deconstructing Barriers To Access Rapid Public Transportation For Commuters With Visual Impairment: A Study Of Embodied Experiences In Delhi Metro-Train

An inclusive city seeks innovative ways to accommodate diverse interests and practices of people with different needs. It requires that the basic rights of freedom, equality, and condition of justice and dignity of all its citizens (including persons with disabilities) are ensured. Delhi is undoubtedly one of the most diverse urban city centers in India. The Delhi metro train with its many accessibility features seems an archetype of an ideal inclusive and open city for all. Nonetheless, such moves towards disabled-friendliness fail to neutralise all the imperfections in absolute terms. The initiatives oriented to hassle-free travelling could not adequately meet the diverse transport needs of regular commuters with sight disability and do not fully address gaps embedded in metro rail infrastructure. Not with standing these measures to foster seamless journey for the disabled passengers, visually impaired users still come across those barriers which may not be directly apparent in public but are certainly the product of their personally embodied experiences.&#x0D; In the wake of Delhi metro assertion for better mobility and accessible transit environment, the present paper pursues deconstructive approach and attempts to figure out the pragmatic challenges encountered by visually impaired commuters that are often left unnoticed. These covert experiential hindrances are normally manifested in the day to day journey of Delhi Metro train. This is an empirical study based on survey findings stemming from Delhi field survey conducted during PhD course (2016-18). It primarily thrives upon qualitative data pertaining to personal narratives of 40 visually impaired respondents belonging to metropolis of Delhi about their everyday perceptions of transit accessibility, while travelling in metro train.

Politicization, postpolitics and the open city: Openness, closedness and the spatialisation of the political

The idea of the open city has been used both conceptually and analytically to understand the politics of the city. The contrast between the open city and the closed city relies, in part, upon an understanding of the global systems that enfold cities and, consequently, the politics that are – and are not – afforded cities. Notions such as the postpolitical city depend not on temporality where the city has ceased to be political, but a spatialisation of politics where the (properly) political has become excluded by the closed systems that envelope cities. In this paper, we explore analytical and theoretical responses to the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire to disclose the ways that different critiques of neoliberalism and racial capitalism deploy and rely upon different conceptions of the open and closed systems of the city. Rather than settle for the open/closed binary, we seek to understand how different forms of openness and closedness afford/constrain the politicisation (and depoliticization) of city life – and its catastrophes.

Urban phenomena as "sites of memory" in "Open City" by Teju Cole

The purpose of the work is to analyze the autofictional novel by the modern American writer Teju Cole "Open City" using memory studies' optics. Relevance is ensured by an appeal to one of the most important genres of modern literature, autofiction, which combines and fundamentally non-distinguishes documentary and fictional discourses, and the use of the methodological apparatus of the cross-disciplinary sphere of memory studies. The subject of the study is the urban chronotope of New York after the 9/11 terrorist attack and its specific memorial loci. The artistic text in this case acts as a medial representation of reality, and the urban space in it is perceived and can be analyzed as a text. One of the founders of memory studies is French scientist Pierre Nora, whose term "sites of memory" becomes the basis in this work. The narrator of the novel "Open City," Julius, in the process of flaring through New York, perceives the city as a semiotic space, reading the markers of the urban chronotope as memorable and/or historical signs. "Sites of memory," located at the junction of living memory and frozen history, become the most important loci that fix the individual and collective commentary of social history, while being pushed out of the sphere of relevance into the sphere of the forgotten, whilst the narrator of the novel occupies an intermediate position due to the ability to reactualize historical events and memorial narratives, albeit only at the personal level. Such a comparison of "I" and "others" allows to address the issue of national identity and reveal the specifics of the American nation as focused on the future, and not on the past, and erasing the "Sites of memory" from contemporaneity.

青岛市出口贸易转型升级研究

With the development of globalization, export trade must consider the trade relations between countries and regions. As an important economic center city and one of the coastal open cities in China, Qingdao’s own coastal advantages have driven the development of foreign trade. This article takes Qingdao as an example to analyze the current development status of foreign trade in coastal open cities. SWOT analysis is used to analyze the current situation of Qingdao’s export products, and suggestions are proposed to further solve key problems in Qingdao’s export trade, such as accelerating the diversification strategy of the market, extending the industrial chain, improving product added value and independent research and development capabilities, and achieving high-quality development, It will further promote sustainable economic development and enhance the export competitiveness of enterprises.

Cross-cultural interaction and representation of communities in the novel “Open City” by Teju Cole

The modern humanities increasingly tend towards interdisciplinarity, developing various methods and optics of analysis within the framework of the general main topic. Such, for example, is the study of the urban text, begun by academician V. Toporov, which gained popularity only in the 21st century. Rapid changes in the way and pace of life, technologies, science and social structure over the past 150 years require a new understanding of the process of urbanization and modern trends in urban structure and urban life. However, not only the social and applied anthropology of the city itself can be interesting, but also its representation in literary texts. The object of this research is the novel “Open City” by the modern American writer of Nigerian descent Teju Cole, in which New York, as the title itself suggests, becomes the main character and the center of the narrative. The following topics investigated by the author are distinguished in the work: the search for national and cultural identity, the existence of society in multiculturalism, the possibility of building communities that provide the individual with primary, i.e. close connections. The article concludes that the modern state of society within urban locality is best characterized by the term “anomie”, marking the social entropy and disintegration of the axiological system.