This book examines the relationship between social practices and built space, focusing on current cooperative/participative and posthuman approaches to its production and management. From a social-cultural-and-ecological perspective, it explores the modes of engagement of all factors in the constitutional processes of inhabited space. Throughout this interdisciplinary collection, built space is reconsidered in the light of other schools of thought such as philosophy, anthropology, social sciences and political theories and practices. It covers new ground at conceptual, epistemic and methodological levels, focusing on inhabited space from within the framework of globalisation, biopolitics, cultural changes, environmental crisis and new technologies. Organised into three parts, Parts 1 and 2 focus on the role of architects in the emergence of a new ethos for habitation, as well as the modalities of the inclusion of differences in design, discussing the importance of participation and narrative at a theoretical and practical level in architecture. In the third part, the chapters delve into questions regarding the intersection of design, ecology and technoscience in a posthuman approach, which might support the inclusion of differences in design and the emergence of a new environmental ethos. Providing a stimulating landscape of arguments and challenges to new readings of architecture, society and the environment, this book will be of interest to researchers, students and professionals of architecture, urban planning, anthropology and philosophy.

Mapping Vilnius is the first book in a series promoting Critical Urbanism as a way of analyzing the changing relationships between citizens, the state and the international context in shaping urban spaces in Central- and Eastern Europe. In this participatory research into two districts of the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, mapping is used as a process-oriented technique to visualize these relationships in transition. It book was edited by the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism at the European Humanities University in Vilnius. Among the authors are Felix Ackermann, Vaiva Andriušytė, Philip Boos, Benjamin Cope, Dalia Čiupalaitė, Inga Freimane, Elisa Gerbsch, Tomas Grunskis, Max Hellriegel, Alina Jablonskaya, Justas Juzėnas, Anu Kägu, Andrei Karpeka, Yagmur Koreli, Miodrag Kuč, Siarhei Liubimau, Miglė Paužaitė, Indre Ruseckaitė, Tomáš Samec, Aliaksandra Smirnova, Kamilė Užpalytė, Gerda Vaitkevičiūtė, Kotryna Valiukevičiūtė, Clemens Weise, Lennart Wiesiolek

Winner of the 2020 “Outstanding Academic Title” Award, created by Choice Magazine. In Negotiating Space in Latin America, edited by Patricia Vilches, contributors approach spatial practices from multidisciplinary angles. Drawing on cultural studies, film studies, gender studies, geography, history, literary studies, sociology, tourism, and current events, the volume advances innovative conceptualizations on spatiality and treats subjects that range from nineteenth century-nation formation to twenty-first century social movements. Latin America has endured multiple spatial transformations, which contributors analyze from the perspective of the urban, the rural, the market, and the political body. The essays collected here signal how spatial processes constantly shape societal interactions and illuminate the complex relationships between humans and space, emphasizing the role of spatiality in our actions and perceptions. Contributors: Gail A. Bulman, Ana María Burdach Rudloff, James Craine, Angela N. DeLutis-Eichenberger, Carolina Di Próspero, Gustavo Fares, Jennifer Hayward, Silvia Hirsch, Edward Jackiewicz, Magdalena Maiz-Peña, Lucía Melgar, Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Luis H. Peña, Jorge Saavedra Utman, Rosa Tapia, Juan de Dios Torralbo Caballero, Tera Trujillo, Patricia Vilches, and Gareth Wood.

This book examines the dynamics of artistic creativity that transgresses the boundaries of public art, and it looks into the inventions expressed by the practical activities and academic research focused on contemporary urban spaces. The Contradictions of Urban Art demonstrates how the multilingualism of art and science raises the temperature of discussions concerning the city. It advises that what we call 'city art' should include outdoor events, prose, and poetry. (Series: Development in Humanities - Vol. 5)

As China races towards modernity, its cities are experiencing an unprecedented surge in urbanisation, characterised by a relentless influx of migrants and sprawling expansion into suburban realms. Shiyu Yang draws upon Henri Lefebvre's influential theoretical framework and applies it to case studies of two urban villages in Beijing to examine how migrants shape the social production of space in these districts. With a wealth of first-hand material from the field, this study provides essential insights into the ongoing processes and social dynamics that resonate with scholars from cross-disciplinary urban studies as well as practitioners in governance and urban planning.

Wooden buildings housed the majority of Swedish urban populations during the early modern era, but many of these buildings have disappeared as the result of fire, demolition, and modernisation. This book reveals the fundamental role played by the wooden house in the formation of urban Sweden and Swedish history.

This book explores what games and play can tell us about contemporary processes of urbanization and examines how the dynamics of gaming can help us understand the interurban competition that underpins the entrepreneurialism of the smart and creative city. Games and Play in the Creative, Smart and Ecological City is a collection of chapters written by an interdisciplinary group of scholars from game studies, media studies, play studies, architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning. It situates the historical evolution of play and games in the urban landscape and outlines the scope of the various ways games and play contribute to the city’s economy, cultural life and environmental concerns. In connecting games and play more concretely to urban discourses and design strategies, this book urges scholars to consider their growing contribution to three overarching sets of discourses that dominate urban planning and policy today: the creative and cultural economies of cities; the smart and playable city; and ecological cities. This interdisciplinary work will be of great interest to students and scholars of game studies, play studies, landscape architecture (and allied design fields), urban geography, and art history. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003007760

Who shapes our cities? In an age of increasing urban pluralism, globalization and immigration, decreasing public budgets, and an ongoing crisis of authority among designers and planners, the urban environment is shaped by a number of non-traditional stakeholders. The book surveys the kaleidoscope of views on the agency of urbanism, providing an overview of the various scholarly debates and territories that pertain to bottom-up efforts such as everyday urbanism, DIY urbanism, guerilla urbanism, tactical urbanism, and lean urbanism. Uniquely, this books seeks connections between the various movements by curating a range of views on the past, present, and future of bottom-up urbanism. The contributors also connect the recent trend of bottom-up efforts in the West with urban informality in the Global South, drawing parallels and finding contrast between social and institutional structures across the globe. The book appeals to urbanists in the widest sense of the word: those who shape, study, and improve our urban spaces.

This collection of essays, comprised of research first presented at the seventh annual Louisiana Conference on Literature, Language, and Culture, explores one of the most pervasive, vexing, and alluring concepts in the Humanities, that of place. Including essays which encompass a broad range of research fields and methodologies, from Geography to Cybernetics, it presents a cross-section of approaches aimed revealing the complex cultural machinations behind what once may have seemed a static, one-dimensional topic. Investigations into the function of place as a force in contemporary culture inevitably reveal a long history of the interplay between place and cultural product, between 'context' and 'text'. Just as traditional cultures mythologize sacred spaces, so too has Western culture sanctified its own places through its literature. Imagined places such as Faulker’s Yoknapatawpha or Joyce’s Dublin become the focus of conferences and festivals; authors’ homes, birthplaces, and gravesites are transformed into sites of pilgrimage; locales created for television shows and movies become actual businesses catering to a public for whom the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurred; and persisting through the great cultural shifts of the past two hundred years is the popular and romantic notion that words, performances, narratives, and even national identities are always in some way an expression of the places in which they are created and set. With the idea of place foregrounded in so much contemporary discourse, this collection promises to enter into an already lively debate and one which, due to its relevance to where we live and how we make sense of our own “places” within them, does not show any signs of flagging.

Architects are creators of places. Spaces are produced by the social practice of the user within places. Thus, the user is brought into the picture as a producer of space whereas architects are classified as producers of place. The book addresses the notion of power relations within undefined spaces of transition through case study documentations and by analyzing individual and common expressions in four social housing projects in greater Copenhagen. Understanding the struggle of power relations can help identify an interest articulated by the user. The articulations are made by means of additions that are placed within the spaces of transition. The conclusion that can be drawn is that power relations should be recognized by architects as a phenomenon of the dominating aspect of architecture. Neglecting to consider this domination in the conception of residential housing projects has a large impact on the user and his/her possibilities for practicing social interactions.