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Urban Places (urban + place)
Selected AbstractsContested land and mediascapes: The visuality of the postcolonial cityNEW ZEALAND GEOGRAPHER, Issue 1 2009Kevin Glynn Abstract:, This paper explores spatial dynamics of contestation in the ongoing production of textures of urban place in the postcolonial context of Christchurch, New Zealand. It first examines practices of visual inscription that generate landscapes and mediascapes that struggle to naturalize particular social imaginaries, relations and place-identities. It then considers modes of transgression that rework and expand urban spatiality into new visual terrains of contestation such as those associated with digital media. Emergent communities have thus made use of media spaces such as YouTube to reverse the urban gaze, reframe themselves and the city, and re-imagine place-making landscapes and identities. [source] Place, memory and identity: Imagining ,New Asia'ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 3 2005T.C. Chang Abstract:,The rapid transformation of Asian societies and landscapes, especially since the mid-1990s, has engendered much conjecture of the ,Asian renaissance' and the rise of a ,New Asia'. This Special Edition of Asia Pacific Viewpoint explores the intersecting themes of ,urban place', ,social memory' and ,cultural identity' in the articulation of and contestation towards New Asia. Specifically, the six articles here offer various interpretations of New Asia , as tourism marketing tool, political vision and social identity , and the politics involved in urban, tourism and cultural development. From colonial hotels in key South-East Asian cities to the historic waterfront of Singapore; from festivals and rituals in Hong Kong, Hoi An (Vietnam) and Penang (Malaysia) to the clash of cultural values in Manggarai (Indonesia), ,selective remembering' and ,ideological forgetting' are central to the construction of New Asian identities. Ultimately, this Special Edition hopes to provoke continuing discussions on the rhetoric of New Asia and its imaginative and contested geographies, sociologies and histories. [source] Cities and the ,War on Terror'INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2006STEPHEN GRAHAM Programmes of organized, political violence have always been legitimized and sustained through complex imaginative geographies. These tend to be characterized by stark binaries of place attachment. This article argues that the discursive construction of the Bush administration's ,war on terror' since September 11th 2001 has been deeply marked by attempts to rework imaginative geographies separating the urban places of the US ,homeland' and those Arab cities purported to be the sources of ,terrorist' threats against US national interests. On the one hand, imaginative geographies of US cities have been reworked to construct them as ,homeland' spaces which must be re-engineered to address supposed imperatives of ,national security'. On the other, Arab cities have been imaginatively constructed as little more than ,terrorist nest' targets to soak up US military firepower. Meanwhile, the article shows how both ,homeland' and ,target' cities are increasingly being treated together as a single, integrated ,battlespace' within post 9/11 US military doctrine and techno-science. The article concludes with a discussion of the central roles of urban imaginative geographies, overlaid by transnational architectures of US military technology, in sustaining the colonial territorial configurations of a hyper-militarized US Empire. [source] URBAN CLUSTERS AS GROWTH FOCI,JOURNAL OF REGIONAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2009Boris A. Portnov ABSTRACT Urban clusters are geographic concentrations of urban places, some of which may include major cities. Unlike agglomerations, whose geographic boundaries are clearly delineated, urban clusters have "variable" boundaries, with each urban settlement being part of its "own" cluster of populated places, located within its commuting range. As our study indicates, the effect of clustering on urban growth is not uniform: it appears to be positive in low density clusters, and negative in densely populated ones. In particular, outside densely populated areas, towns surrounded by other localities tend to evince higher rates of population growth than their "lone" counterparts. [source] Commodified language in Chinatown: A contextualized approach to linguistic landscape1JOURNAL OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS, Issue 3 2009Jennifer Leeman In Washington DC's newly gentrified Chinatown, recent commercial establishments, primarily non-Chinese owned chains, use Chinese-language signs as design features targeted towards people who neither read nor have ethnic ties to Chinese. Using this neighborhood as a case study, we advocate a contextualized, historicized and spatialized perspective on linguistic landscape which highlights that landscapes are not simply physical spaces but are instead ideologically charged constructions. Drawing from cultural geography and urban studies, we analyze how written language interacts with other features of the built environment to construct commodified urban places. Taking a contextually informed, qualitative approach, we link micro-level analysis of individual Chinese-language signs to the specific local socio-geographic processes of spatial commodification. Such a qualitative approach to linguistic landscape, which emphasizes the importance of sociohistorical context, and which includes analysis of signage use, function, and history, leads to a greater understanding of the larger sociopolitical meanings of linguistic landscapes. [source] | ||||||||||