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Introduction This chapter explores the way that pragmatic approaches offer hope for developing the interventions needed to respond to the ecological crisis, and the wider crisis that is modern knowledge. The overall argument is that pragmatic approaches, along with a family of non- and anti-representational approaches, are inherently creative. They embrace the fact that they are generative of the world and within the world. They are ecological philosophies of change and innovation and this places them at odds with modern knowledge which, with its reductive
the essay form itself. Most of the scholarship on the essay itself has been done by Americans on American essays or considering the British periodical essayists. Many of the articles I reference in this chapter come from American literary journals, particularly River Teeth and Fourth Genre, two of the three main literary journals that solely publish non-fiction, and I am favouring the perspectives of practising creative non-fictionists who are also either academics or editors. In terms of audience, Chris Arthur is frequently published in American literary journals
The collection ends appropriately with a poem by Andrew McNeillie that he wrote about Robinson. Furthering the creative process, McNeillie, who is both a literary critic and creative writer, diverges from the critical essay form and offers a creative reflection of Robinson’s relationship with the landscape and mapping upon his arrival to Ireland through poetic form.
‘official’ functioning in urban space seems to constitute the principal value of such areas. Due to the free nature of these lands, they act proactively on the user, thereby allowing subjective perception of space and its grassroots creation (permitted to every user, irrespective of his social status) (Gawryszewska et al., 2016). During her speech at a conference ‘Growing in Cities in Switzerland’, Stefanie Hennecke (2016) emphasised the creative potential provided by ‘dysfunctional’ space, which does not in any way imply that it is ‘non-functional’. In fact, by the lack
A creative reflection on Manchester’s Oxford Road Corridor, weaving the author’s personal relationship with the road into the space’s fabric and everyday life.
attributed to stakeholders may vary widely, although in practice there is overlap. We can distinguish between dashboards providing accountability and legitimacy through transparency (Perez and Rushing, 2007: 11), collecting intelligence and providing cues for action, managing emergencies, benchmarking and comparison, surveilling and controlling (Kitchin, 2013: 15), offering democratising tools for civic empowerment and social change (Holden and Moreno Pires, 2015), and providing creative opportunities to hackers, artists, app makers and citizens, like creating data
a deep, creative and radical democracy ( Jakimow, 2008 ; McFarlane, 2006). With these insights, pragmatism can contribute to the development of a form of reflexive development practice that allows you to remain sane and do something useful. In this chapter, four dilemmas in the field of development are introduced and connected to broader difficulties in doing development which relies on big-D and little-d perspectives as well as efforts to practise reflexive development. Drawing on examples from Iran regarding the production of development documents
A short creative piece which meditates on the notion of randomised and transient violence within heavily populated urban centres. Violence in a small town or village might be noticed more and talked about for weeks; violence in a big city – in this case Manchester – flares up and then disappears in the blink of an eye. How does the city hold itself together through these convulsions?
This book explores contemporary urban experiences connected to practices of sharing and collaboration. Part of a growing discussion on the cultural meaning and the politics of urban commons, it uses examples from Europe and Latin America to support the view that a world of mutual support and urban solidarity is emerging today in, against, and beyond existing societies of inequality. In such a world, people experience the potentialities of emancipation activated by concrete forms of space commoning. By focusing on concrete collective experiences of urban space appropriation and participatory design experiments this book traces differing, but potentially compatible, trajectories through which common space (or space-as-commons) becomes an important factor in social change. In the everydayness of self-organized neighborhoods, in the struggles for justice in occupied public spaces, in the emergence of “territories in resistance,” and in dissident artistic practices of collaborative creation, collective inventiveness produces fragments of an emancipated society.
Manchester: Something rich and strange challenges us to see the quintessential post-industrial city in new ways. Bringing together twenty-three diverse writers and a wide range of photographs of Greater Manchester, it argues that how we see the city can have a powerful effect on its future – an urgent question given how quickly the urban core is being transformed. The book uses sixty different words to speak about the diversity of what we think of as Manchester – whether the chimneys of its old mills, the cobbles mostly hidden under the tarmac, the passages between terraces, or the everyday act of washing clothes in a laundrette. Unashamedly down to earth in its focus, this book makes the case for a renewed imaginative relationship that recognises and champions the fact that we’re all active in the making and unmaking of urban spaces.