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crucially, how can these literatures be in solidarity to hold up a Black right to urban life? Reparations, climate change, and the city Bringing Black lives, Black ideas, and Black political logics into conversation with the largely Anglo-American and Eurocentric literature on urban political ecology does not need to mean expunging theoretical frames that
In the early years of the cinema and into the 1910s and 1920s, it was less the film than cinema-going itself that attracted urban publics. In this era, people were enthusiastic about technology and the achievements of modernity; while at the same time they felt anxious about the rapid and radical changes in their social and economic life. In Germany, this contradictory experience was especially harsh and perceptible in the urban metropolis of Berlin. The article demonstrates how within city life, Berlin cinemas – offering the excitement of innovation as well as optimal distraction and entertainment – provided an urban space where, by cinema-going, appeal and uncertainty could be positively reconciled.
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.
Many current assumptions about health provision in medieval English cities derive not from the surviving archival or archaeological evidence but from the pronouncements of Victorian sanitary reformers whose belief in scientific progress made them dismissive of earlier attempts to ameliorate the quality of urban life. Our own tendency to judge historical responses to disease by the exacting standards of modern biomedicine reflects the same anachronistic attitude, while a widespread conviction that England lagged centuries behind Italy in matters of health and hygiene seems to reinforce presumptions of ‘backwardness’ and ‘ignorance’. By contrast, this paper argues that a systematic exploration of primary source material reveals a very different approach to collective health, marked by direct intervention on the part of the crown and central government and the active involvement of urban communities, especially after the Black Death of 1348-49. A plethora of regulations for the elimination of recognized hazards was then accompanied by major schemes for environmental improvement, such as the introduction of piped water systems and arrangements for refuse collection.
In Cairo collages, the large-scale political, economic, and social changes in Egypt brought on by the 2011 revolution are set against the declining fortunes of a single apartment building in a specific Cairo neighbourhood. The violence in Tahrir Square and Mohamed Mahmud Street; the post-January euphoric moment; the increasing militarisation of urban life; the flourishing of dystopian novels set in Cairo; the neo-liberal imaginaries of Dubai and Singapore as global models; gentrification and evictions in poor neighbourhoods; the forthcoming new administrative capital for Egypt – all are narrated in parallel to the ‘little’ story of the adventures and misfortunes of everyday interactions in a middle-class building in the neighbourhood of Doqi.
and death, where pigs could be reared only in large piggeries, where dairy cows and private slaughtermen were being consolidated or pushed to the periphery and where horses were (slowly) being replaced by machines. This book has shown that human responses to different types of urban animals played an important role in shaping modern urban life including laws, policing, geography, transportation and culture. The stories of entangled human and animal lives in the city show that there was no inevitable progress towards a city devoid of all domestic animals aside from
city, but there is little reason to believe that Highland migrants were peculiarly vulnerable to them. However, the material experience of Highlanders in urban Scotland is only one part of the story. Another important question is the extent to which they attempted to perpetuate any sense of communal and ethnic identity in the new context. The Gaels possessed a distinctive language and culture and it is an intriguing problem how far these were maintained or diluted by the urban experience. Traditionally, sociologists and historians have often seen urban life as an
and clandestine. Johny Pitts, Afropean ( 2020 ), 19 Introduction This chapter exposes the roles various urban infrastructures play in reproducing racialised identities and patterns of segregation in postcolonial European cities. It contributes to new ways of knowing European cities (see Introduction) by reinscribing colonial histories into daily urban life. In so doing, it contributes to the effort to reinsert European cities into global histories marked by
the more ‘ordinary’ misbehaviour that was a constant feature of town life. As Patricia Turning has argued for medieval southern France, the records of crime and misbehaviour, though constructed by men and often appearing to be dominated by men’s transgressions, offer clues about women’s day-to-day concerns and experiences of urban life, as well as the strategies they employed to fight ‘for power and placement within the social hierarchy’. 4 Women’s involvement in the offences that were categorised as trespass, their legal
greed and ambition of the city. But Defoe was both a native Londoner and perhaps the period’s most active chronicler and embodiment of urban life. While there were indeed many ways – political, legal, medical and aesthetic – that early modern people objected to London’s smoky air, they did not yet frame urban dirtiness as a sin against pristine nature. 3 Nor did Defoe despise his native city. Rather, something else is going on in this passage, something that allowed a writer to gesture towards the proposition