Exploring The Spatiality Of The City Across Cultural Texts

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.

Architects habitually disregard disciplinary boundaries of their profession in search for synergies and inspiration. The realm of language, although not considered to be architects’ natural environment, opens opportunities to further stretch and expand the architectural imagination and the set of tools used in the design process. When used in the context of architectural pedagogy, the exploration of the relationship between space and language opens the discussion further to include the reflection on the design studio structure, the learning process in creative subjects and the ethical dimension of architectural education. This book offers a glimpse into architectural pedagogies exploring the relationship between space and language, using literary methods and linguistic experiments. The examples discuss a wide range of approaches from international perspective, exploring opportunities and challenges of engaging literary methods and linguistic experiments in architectural education. The theme of Catalysts discusses the use of literary methods in architectural pedagogy, where literary texts are used to jumpstart and support the design process, resulting in deeply contextual approaches capable of subverting embedded hierarchies of the design studio. Tensions explore the gap between the world and its description, employing linguistic experiments and literary methods to enrich and expand the architectural vocabulary to include the experience of space in its infinite complexity. This book will be useful for innovators in architectural education and those seeking to expand their teaching practice to incorporate literary methods, and to creatives interested in making teaching a part of their practice. It may also appeal to students from design-based disciplines with an established design studio culture, demonstrating how to use narrative, poetry and literature to expand and feed your imagination.

In today’s world, it is crucial to understand how cities and urban spaces operate in order for them to continue to develop and improve. To ensure cities thrive, further study on past and current policies and practices is required to provide a thorough understanding. Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East examines the poetics and politics of city and urban spaces in contemporary South Asia and the Middle East and seeks to shed light on how individuals constitute, experience, and navigate urban spaces in everyday life. This book aims to initiate a multidisciplinary approach to the study of city life by engaging disciplines such as urban geography, gender studies, feminism, literary criticism, and human geography. Covering key topics such as racism, urban spaces, social inequality, and gender roles, this reference work is ideal for government officials, policymakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, academicians, instructors, and students.

In this volume, scholars from a wide range of fields within the humanities explore the links between space and place and their relation to cultural expression. This collection shows that a focus on the spatial can help elucidate important facets of symbolic expression and cultural production, whether it be literature, music, dance, films, or art.

Spatiality has risen to become a key concept in literary and cultural studies, with critical focus on the ‘spatial turn’ presenting a new approach to the traditional literary analyses of time and history. Robert T. Tally Jr. explores differing aspects of the spatial in literary studies today, providing: An overview of the spatial turn across literary theory, from historicism and postmodernism to postcolonialism and globalization Introductions to the major theorists of spatiality, including Michel Foucault, David Harvey, Edward Soja, Erich Auerbach, Georg Lukács, and Fredric Jameson Analysis of critical perspectives on spatiality, such as the writer as map-maker, literature of the city and urban space, and the concepts of literary geography, cartographics and geocriticism. This clear and engaging study presents readers with a thought provoking and illuminating guide to the literature and criticism of ‘space’.

The revised and updated second edition of Introduction to Cities explores why cities are such a vital part of the human experience and how they shape our everyday lives. Written in engaging and accessible terms, Introduction to Cities examines the study of cities through two central concepts: that cities are places, where people live, form communities, and establish their own identities, and that they are spaces, such as the inner city and the suburb, that offer a way to configure and shape the material world and natural environment. Introduction to Cities covers the theory of cities from an historical perspective right through to the most recent theoretical developments. The authors offer a balanced account of life in cities and explore both positive and negative themes. In addition, the text takes a global approach, with examples ranging from Berlin and Chicago to Shanghai and Mumbai. The book is extensively illustrated with updated maps, charts, tables, and photographs. This new edition also includes a new section on urban planning as well as new chapters on cities as contested spaces, exploring power and politics in an urban context. It contains; information on the status of poor and marginalized groups and the impact of neoliberal policies; material on gender and sexuality; and presents a greater range of geographies with more attention to European, Latin American, and African cities. Revised and updated, Introduction to Cities provides a complete introduction to the history, evolution, and future of our modern cities.

'Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues' is an inter-disciplinary study exploring the nature of how we conceive, construct, interpret, practice, perceive and represent space and place.

An encyclopedia about various topics relating to urban studies.