Urban Labyrinths

Urban Labyrinths: Informal Settlements, Architecture, and Social Change in Latin America examines intervention initiatives in informal settlements in Latin American cities as social, spatial, architectural, and cultural processes. From the mid-20th century to the present, Latin America and other regions in the Global South have experienced a remarkable demographic trend, with millions of people moving from rural areas to cities in search of work, healthcare, and education. Without other options, these migrants have created self-built settlements mostly located on the periphery of large metropolitan areas. While the initial reaction of governments was to eliminate these communities, since the 1990s, several Latin American cities began to advance new urban intervention approaches for improving quality of life. This book examines informal settlement interventions in five Latin American cities: Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and Tijuana. It explores the Favela-Bairro Program in Rio de Janeiro during the 1990s which sought to improve living conditions and infrastructure in favelas. It investigates projects propelled by Social Urbanism in Medellín at the beginning of the 2000s, aimed at revitalizing marginalized areas by creating a public transportation network, constructing civic buildings, and creating public spaces. Furthermore, the book examines the long-term initiatives led by SEHAB in São Paulo, which simultaneously addresses favela upgrading works, water pollution remediation strategies, and environmental stewardship. It discusses current intervention initiatives being developed in informal settlements in Buenos Aires and Tijuana, exploring the urban design strategies that address complex challenges faced by these communities. Taken together, the Latin American architects, planners, landscape architects, researchers, and stakeholders involved in these projects confirm that urbanism, architecture, and landscape design can produce positive urban and social transformations for the most underprivileged. This book will be of interest to students, researchers, and professionals in planning, urbanism, architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, urban geography, public policy, as well as other spatial design disciplines.

Ten original essays examine the transactions between real places and the literary imagination, including the reinvention of real places in literary form, from 1800 to the present day. They deal with different kinds of locations (islands, countries, cities), the topoi writers use to articulate a sense of place (maps, ruins, landscape, history), their generic manifestations in fiction, travel writing, topography, (auto)biography and poetry, and the theoretical and methodological issues which arise. The focus moves outwards from local to regional and national issues, covering questions of cultural identity, space, representation, historicity, and modernity in England, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, the United States, and the South Pacific. The contributors are drawn from both sides of the Atlantic, and include established scholars as well as newer voices.

Labyrinths, Intellectuals and the Revolution traces the development of the postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan novel. Its close readings of major texts are based in the spatial practices of these novels.

The eight essays in this collection explore the work of Adrienne Rich, one of America’s most significant living writers and a poet and a public intellectual with a substantial audience both inside and outside the academy. Taken together, the essays argue for a shift in the perceived center of gravity of Rich’s career, from the passionate and eloquent poems of a largely personal feminist awakening, from the mid 60s to the early 80s, to the equally (if differently) passionate and eloquent poems of a more broadly public re-imagination of our country and its history, beginning with her work of the mid 1980s. Rich has remained committed to the reconstruction of poetry’s place in public as well as private life, nationally and globally. From varied perspectives, accessible to the common reader as well as the specialist, the collection addresses Rich’s negotiation of the boundary between these public and private spheres and the potential of poetry as a revolutionary medium and alternate epistemology, a means, as the title expresses it, of recovery and regeneration. Rich has aimed always, as the last lines of her poem “Planetarium” (1968) have it, at “the relief of the body / and the reconstruction of the mind,” and this collection works to describe her effort to extend the reach of that healing motive across a continent and a culture. "In these eight keenly executed essays edited by William Waddell, we see Rich finally removing those “asbestos gloves” once used to handle sizzling political topics. Critics in this volume show Adrienne Rich struggling barehanded with changing poetic strategies, complex new subject positions and the relations of power and cultural practice in the constitution of history. Transformative cartographer of words and perceptions, Rich, as Waddell argues, outlines “a method for redefining American space,” remapping North American culture for the marginalized, the repressed and the resistant. Waddell’s collection celebrates the polyphony of politics and aesthetics in Rich’s work, shaping for the reader an ethical discourse intensively visible, for the first time, in volumes such as An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, but equally present throughout Rich’s prose and poetry." Mary Lynn Broe, Caroline Werner Gannett Professor, Rochester Institute of Technology

This collection of analytical essays is the result of several conferences throughout 1991, the centennary of Herman Melville's death. They survey the past and present of Melville Studies and suggest directions for the future.

She shows that images both from Melville and from popular sources of the time represented New York variously as Capital, Labyrinth, City of Man, and City of God, and she goes on to demonstrate that he resisted a generalizing or totalizing representation of the city by revealing its hybrid identity and giving voice to the poor, the displaced, and the racially excluded.

An attempt to understand coded messages and modern interactive thinking, including the Internet, through the symbol of the labyrinth. In this cultural history, Attali shows that nonlinear searching has always been a part of cultures and may well become more important in the future. Color photos & illustrations.

This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.