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Urban Fabric (urban + fabric)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	75%

Selected Abstracts

GLOBALIZATION AND EXTERRITORIALITY IN METROPOLITAN CAIRO

GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2005
PETRA KUPPINGER
ABSTRACT. Rapid construction of new spaces like hotels, malls, private clubs, and gated communities in Greater Cairo, Egypt produces structures disconnected spatially and conceptually from most of the existing urban fabric. Their spatial concepts and practices, as well as architectural forms and expertise, are based largely on globally available models. Planning and construction are guided by the search for security in the face of real or imagined fear of the urban masses and political upheaval. Concrete walls, guarded entrances, and high-tech security technology bear witness to these fears. Analysis of the Mena House Hotel, the Grand Egyptian Museum project, and the First Mall in Giza shows how these projects globalize Cairo and localize the global. Often these globalized spaces are remade by creating local and regional ties and design features that were not anticipated by the planners. Such changes shed light on underlying dynamics and contribute to a better understanding of in situ globalization. Whereas their physical features tend to accentuate their globalized nature, these spaces do not exist in isolation from their geographical and cultural contexts. Their everyday realities tell tales of reterritorialization that are frequently overlooked in scholarly debates. [source]

Urban Shadows: Materiality, the ,Southern City' and Urban Theory

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 2 2008
Colin McFarlane
We may be witnessing a ,Southern turn' in urban studies, but the implications for urban theory are only beginning to be worked through. In this article, I argue the need for urbanists to engage with a variety of ,shadows' on the edges of urban theory. The article engages with literature that theorises the interactions between urban materiality and social change, from community development literature to more expansive sociomaterial theorisations of the urban fabric. I invoke an expansive conception of the relations between the urban fabric and social change, and draw on a variety of examples through which infrastructures come to matter politically in the creative destruction of capitalist redevelopment. The article ends with consideration of how comparison might be conceived as a strategy of indirect and uncertain learning that entails the possibility of transformation in a predominantly Euro-American-orientated urban theory. [source]

Using Multimedia to Introduce Young People to Public Art in Glasgow

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ART & DESIGN EDUCATION, Issue 3 2000
Glen Coutts
This paper is based on a presentation at the NSEAD/AAIAD Millennium Conference in Bristol, April 2000 and takes as its focus a recent multimedia publication, a CD-ROM, commissioned by Glasgow 1999, entitled ,Scanning the City'. The commission was to find effective ways that students in schools could interrogate the diverse urban fabric of Glasgow. The electronic revolution has shifted the paradigms of teaching and learning by creating the opportunity to engage interactively with visual and textual data in ways that permit investigation of the built environments at a number of levels of intensity. The paper explains the background to the CD-ROM, describes the design, content and theoretical underpinning of ,Scanning the City' and discusses ways it might be used in a variety of educational contexts. It concludes by looking forward to the next stages of the research including a study of how young people and teachers are using the CD-ROM and other related multimedia publications. [source]

Paras, Palaces, Pathogens: frameworks for the growth of Calcutta, 1800,1850

CITY & SOCIETY, Issue 1 2000
John Archer
THE HISTORICAL FABRIC OF CALCUTTA incorporates both the perspective of indigenous knowledges and practices, as well as successive regimes of "improvements" that British colonial authorities sought to introduce in the period 1798-1850. In the face of these diverse interests the urban fabric served as a crurial medium for the negotiation of difference. Portions of the indigenous population selectively adapted their budding designs and social practices to British conventions, while protecting other patterns and practices in efforts both to accommodate and to maintain difference. [Colonial cities, urban planning, hygiene, India, Calcutta] [source]