99 research outputs found
The radicals' city: Urban environment, polarisation, cohesion
No full textBringing together comparative case studies from Belfast, Beirut, Amsterdam and Berlin, this book examines the role of the urban environment in social polarisation processes. In doing so, it provides a timely and refreshingly innovative voice in the confusing babble on (counter-)terrorism, urban conflict and community cohesion. Despite their socio-political differences, these cities are telling cases of how the location and shape of very mundane objects such as rubbish bins, bridges, clothes' stores, shopping malls and cafés - in addition to the obvious fences, walls and barbed wire - are often subject to heated controversies and influence the way urban conflict is 'lived' and practised. © Ralf Brand and Sara Fregonese 2013. All rights reserved
The radicals' city: Urban environment, polarisation, cohesion
No full textBringing together comparative case studies from Belfast, Beirut, Amsterdam and Berlin, this book examines the role of the urban environment in social polarisation processes. In doing so, it provides a timely and refreshingly innovative voice in the confusing babble on (counter-)terrorism, urban conflict and community cohesion. Despite their socio-political differences, these cities are telling cases of how the location and shape of very mundane objects such as rubbish bins, bridges, clothes' stores, shopping malls and cafés - in addition to the obvious fences, walls and barbed wire - are often subject to heated controversies and influence the way urban conflict is 'lived' and practised. © Ralf Brand and Sara Fregonese 2013. All rights reserved
The radicals' city: Urban environment, polarisation, cohesion
No full textBringing together comparative case studies from Belfast, Beirut, Amsterdam and Berlin, this book examines the role of the urban environment in social polarisation processes. In doing so, it provides a timely and refreshingly innovative voice in the confusing babble on (counter-)terrorism, urban conflict and community cohesion. Despite their socio-political differences, these cities are telling cases of how the location and shape of very mundane objects such as rubbish bins, bridges, clothes' stores, shopping malls and cafés - in addition to the obvious fences, walls and barbed wire - are often subject to heated controversies and influence the way urban conflict is 'lived' and practised. © Ralf Brand and Sara Fregonese 2013. All rights reserved
“A demarcation in the hearts”:everyday urban frontiers in Beirut
No full textConflict in Lebanon is very frequently interpreted by media and foreign policy experts and practitioners as solely a ‘proxy battleground’ and a ‘microcosm’ of regional rivalries, notably between Saudi Arabia and Iran (via the party-and-militia Hezbollah). The violent clashes that engulfed the country and its capital in May 2008 were also framed within this interpretation. More generally, this tendency is also common to academic studies of conflict. According to Kalyvas (2006), most research on violence focuses excessively on “macrolevel” narratives and predefined social cleavages and instead tends to dismiss microlevel evidence “as irrelevant or too messy” (2006, p. 6). Within days in May 2008, Beirut’s urban space and built environment were re-drawn: roads barricaded, areas divided, and buildings deliberately targeted. This chapter concerns the formation and resurgence of urban borders during and in the aftermath of the violence. While there has been copious amounts of studies of cities as constellations of self-contained entities such as enclaves, gated communities and ghettos, there has been less attention in urban studies on borders and boundaries (Iossifova, 2013) intended as “intricate urban phenomena shaped by complex transcalar processes” (2013, p. 4), and on the ways in which microlevel urban cleavages shape the everyday tangible and intangible spatialities of conflict. This chapter bridges this gap, by linking previously disjointed theories from architecture and political geography: namely, frontier urbanism (Pullan, 2011) and urban geopolitics (Fregonese, 2017; Graham, 2004a; Yacobi and Pullan, 2014). Particularly, the notions of sense of territoriality and of obduracy of urban frontiers, are built upon and developed here to highlight the importance of everyday aspects surrounding the resurgence and formation of old and new urban borders in situations of conflict. The first part of the chapter traces the context of the clashes that engulfed part of Beirut in early May 2008, and outlines some of the nodes in the urban geography of violence that became relevant in the interpretation of the conflict by the research participants. The second part conceptualises theoretically Beirut’s conflict-driven urban changes, building mutually on urban geopolitics and frontier urbanism: the former benefitting from frontier urbanism to expand its over-militaristic focus, and the latter benefitting from recent debates in urban geopolitics about the value of the everyday (Fregonese, 2012) and the ordinary (Rokem et al., 2017) in thinking about conflict in cities. The third part focuses on three processes of resurgence and renegotiation of tangible and intangible borders: the green line, targetable spaces, and latent demarcations. The chapter ends with an invitation for more research on conflict that takes seriously the everyday and experiential aspects of urban frontiers. The following pages rely on qualitative evidence gathered from 20 semi-structured interviews (of which 2 walking interviews) in Beirut between October and December 2010. Interviews focused on residents with direct experience of the May 2008 clashes, by living in targeted areas or working in targeted buildings
Review forum: War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon, Sara Fregonese, I.B.Tauris (2019)
No full textVolta Alessandro
No full textThe New Dictionary of Scientific Biography (extension and updating of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography) is one of the most substantial reference works in the field of the history of science. An up-to-date overview on Alessandro Volta's science with new perspectives offered by the author. Information and critical analysis is also provided on the main secondary literature produced on this main protagonist of enlightenment science after the 1976 entry "Volta Alessandro" in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Corrigendum
No full text Matthew Gandy (2017) Urban atmospheres. cultural geographies 24(3): 353–374. The author of this article would like to make the following correction: The publication year for the S.Fregonese reference in endnote 3 is incorrectly listed as ‘2007’. Note 3 should read: The discussion took place in response to a paper presented by Sara Fregonese at the John Harvard Symposium entitled ‘Topographies of Citizenship’ hosted by CRASSH (Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge, 4–5 February 2016. See S.Fregonese, ‘Affective Atmospheres, Urban Geo-Politics, and Conflict (De)escalation in Beirut’, Political Geography, 61, 2017, pp. 1–10. </jats:p
Urban geopolitics 8 years on:hybrid sovereignties, the everyday, and geographies of peace
No full textUrban events like 9-11 and the Arab Spring have deeply marked the first two decades of a century in which the majority of the world population will live in cities. This essay reviews present and potential future debates about the relation between cities and geopolitics, particularly the work of urban geopolitics. I trace three debates centred on three relationships: that between city and sovereignty; between official and everyday urban practices; between violent and peaceful geographies. I point towards three avenues of potential engagement of geographers with the theme of geopolitics and the city. The first avenue leads to appreciating the complex relationships between the state and the non-state that are nowadays increasingly relevant and visible. The second concerns geographies of the everyday, the unofficial, and the unplanned. The third concerns the possibility for an urban geopolitics of peace and its inclusion, rather than focussing exclusively on war and its avoidance
Affective atmospheres, urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut
No full textThe article joins literature on urban geopolitics and on affective atmospheres to trace the intensities of feeling that propagate during escalation and de-escalation of urban conflict in Beirut. Based on two months of fieldwork in 2010 in the Lebanese capital, it considers the deadly clashes of May 2008 between government- and opposition-affiliated militias. Political decisions and deliberate interventions involving the urban built environment before and after the clashes, contributed to propagating affective atmospheres of (de)escalation, which in turnimpacted on the residents’ practical and emotional responses to violence. The paper proposes an atmospheric urban geopolitics that moves away from techno-centric, disembodied approaches to urban conflict, and that instead takes seriously the lived experiences of urban (de)escalation
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