139 research outputs found
Dancing Your Way Through:An Explorative Study of City-Making Skills
No full textThe practice of “city-making” –a civic-led form of urban development– is currently gaining attention from urban professionals and scholars worldwide. Whereas research has so far focused mostly on the conditions that make such civic-led urban development possible, little research has been done on skills and capacities of city-makers. This challenge is taken up in this chapter. Interviews with city-makers across Europe reveal that whereas knowledge of socio-spatial processes and process skills are important, city-makers also deploy a third kind of skill, e.g. the ability to act in the moment, adapt to contingencies, and connect personal drivers to city wide processes. This third kind of skills is further conceptualized, by drawing out an analogy with Deleuzian-Guattarian lines of flight and modern dance improvisation techniques. Four dance improvisation techniques are discussed in more detail and compared with the practices described by the city-makers interviewed for this study. The concluding section of this chapter speculates how the notion of improvisation could be adopted within wider practices of spatial planning and urban governance as well
Dancing Your Way Through:An Explorative Study of City-Making Skills
No full textThe practice of “city-making” –a civic-led form of urban development– is currently gaining attention from urban professionals and scholars worldwide. Whereas research has so far focused mostly on the conditions that make such civic-led urban development possible, little research has been done on skills and capacities of city-makers. This challenge is taken up in this chapter. Interviews with city-makers across Europe reveal that whereas knowledge of socio-spatial processes and process skills are important, city-makers also deploy a third kind of skill, e.g. the ability to act in the moment, adapt to contingencies, and connect personal drivers to city wide processes. This third kind of skills is further conceptualized, by drawing out an analogy with Deleuzian-Guattarian lines of flight and modern dance improvisation techniques. Four dance improvisation techniques are discussed in more detail and compared with the practices described by the city-makers interviewed for this study. The concluding section of this chapter speculates how the notion of improvisation could be adopted within wider practices of spatial planning and urban governance as well
: A Dialogue between Literature and Urbanism in Contemporary (Post-)Pastoral Cityscapes
No full textSince the establishment of ecocriticism, the traditional Western dualistic categories of spaces and places have become objects of increasing pluralistic refi gurations in light of the challenges posed by current environmental crises. More and more scholars have discussed how rooted dichotomies, including country/city and nature/culture, should be reconsidered for better acknowledging the sense of connectedness occurring between humans and the surrounding nonhuman world. Consequences of this approach in literary and cultural studies have been pivotal: new environmentally oriented hermeneutic practices have developed, which allow for reevaluating phenomena linked to old-fashioned understandings of the natural world. Among them, the pastoral, traditionally conceived as the contrast between the rural and the urban, has been reexamined by ecocritics through new concepts, starting from the “ post-pastoral ” ( Gifford, 1999 ). By stressing the investigation of the relationship between the human and the environment in pastoral representations, the post-pastoral has become a favorable tool ( Gifford, 2006 ) for enhancing ethical considerations in response to the challenges posed by the Anthropocene. This transdisciplinary chapter is also inspired by “ geocriticism, ” which reflects on how literary narratives infl uence spatial practices in the real, material world. Specifi cally, this chapter discusses how the neologism “ cittagna ”– blending the Italian terms citt ` a (city) and campagna (country)whichfi rst appeared in Stefano Benni ’ s novel Prendiluna ( 2017 ), allows critics to reflect on the development of similar combinatory processes in contemporary urban spaces. When considering this process in parallel with the notion of post-pastoral, “cittagna,” becomes a useful concept for observing how, in current cityscapes, the emergence of new spaces and places negotiates the conventional country/city split, while highlighting the sense of intertwining between the two terms. Hence, attention is placed on how two possible examples of rising “cittagnas” – roof gardens and off-leash dog parks – can be read as evidence of the increasing attentiveness toward issues of human-nonhuman relationality in today ’ s urbanism, which becomes a hope on the horizon for facing current environmental concerns
Opening up the planning landscape : 15 years of actor-relational approaches to spatial planning in Flanders, the Netherlands and beyond.
No full textstatus: Publishe
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